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[Game piracy may be somewhat stymied in the West, but in this case study, Seoul-based writer Rumas looks at the Nintendo DS piracy problem in Korea, discussing the cultural and practical problems of game copying.] Korea has long had the reputation of being an epicenter of piracy in the games industry, but the greater-than-expected domestic success of Nintendo's DS has thrust things further out into the open than ever before. While no reliable figures exist at this point in time, all it takes is a pair of eyes to see just how widespread the practice is. The recent report claiming ninety-percent R4 (or other DS storage device) ownership among DS users in North America was proven to be a misattribution, of course, but the statement would be more applicable - if still not completely true - in Korea. Over here, piracy is nothing if not absolutely and completely normal. Not Limited to the HardcoreTo get an idea of what things are like, consider some random personal experiences I've had in the last few weeks. Anecdotal, to be sure, but very much representative of the situation that exists throughout the country at present. I recently met up with a friend. His son came along, a game-obsessed third-grader who, unlike any other Korean kid I've ever known, insists on speaking only English with me, despite the fact that he knows very little of the language. Aware that I'm a gamer, he proudly proclaimed to me that he was the owner of a brand new R4 card for his DS. Just to mess with him, I faked a scold and told him that the R4 was bad. He emphatically replied to me the following, complete with gestures to try and pull the words out of his mouth: "I... R4... bad think is NO!" The 'NO' was accompanied by an X-shaped cross of the hands. Laughing, I asked him how he got a hold of it. His uncle bought it for him, he said. A week before that, my wife and I were at the local Lotte Mart one night doing some shopping. A middle-aged woman was there with her twenty-something daughter, and they were examining the DS section, debating what games to buy for a younger sibling along with a new DS Lite. Price was obviously an issue, and though it was clear that they both possessed an extremely minimal knowledge of the subject at hand, the decision they came to in the end was very revealing: just buy the DS, and then get one of those special cards that have all the games on them already. Money saved, problem solved.
There are countless similar stories I could share, but these two illustrate the situation well enough. In Korea, piracy of video games isn't limited to the hardcore crowd; it's everywhere, prevalent in every age group and economic class that exists. And beyond being a matter of money - of not wanting to spend money, that is - piracy for Koreans is, perhaps even foremost, a matter of convenience. As illustrated above, R4 owners aren't necessarily tech-savvy. In fact, a decent number of those who venture to Seoul's Yongsan Electronics Market seeking to buy one aren't even aware that they can pick and choose the games that they want to download from the comfort of their own computer at home. Rather, the vendor shows them a list of games, transferring the titles they select to the flash card. The going rate at present is around 90,000 Korean Won, or about $87 USD, for the whole shebang. It should also be noted that the vast majority of those you see consulting Yongsan vendors about the R4 with hushed voices are parents and young women. (Page 1/3) Next
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Comments
This is really pathetic... Hope Korea's economy gets better and people start paying for what they're getting.
Consoles are pretty expensive too. I bought mine for around USD 480 at our local eBay-partner "Mercado Libre" (after considering shipping costs, the current US console mark up and the time, I realized it was a good offer). However, specialized stores have it at over $2500 (around USD 800). The PlayStation 3 was being sold in a known supermarket for $5999 (that would be virtually USD 2000, ref. "Selling Sony's PS3 is "illegal in Argentina"", The Inquirer, 2007-08-01). With these prices, one realizes it is very hard to go the legal route.
It is common to see people selling MP3 "CDs" for $5 (less than USD 2), or CDs with five recently launched movies for $10 (just above USD 3) on train, buses or even on street. There has been a boom with the release of MP3-able phones (in 2006 there were over 30 million mobile phones with just around 40 million inhabitants, ref. "Ya hay más de treinta millones de celulares", Clarin.com, 2006-01-07), which only incremented the trading of MP3s and videos.
Personally, I buy my games from Amazon. I have considered buying a R4 (and in fact, still consider it). But I am able to afford them. However, I can understand when someone tells me they cannot spend an eighth of their income to buy a single game when they could buy ten for a tenth.
South America is not a big market in terms of current console usage, and will never be with the current prices. I always say that US has the lowest price compared with Asia and Europe (in plain dollars), but even then it is too expensive for us. And since there would never be a market paying less than US, piracy will always exist here. For a game to be affordable here, it should cost no more than $50 (USD 17), which is simple impossible.
You mean it's OK to steal "all the bad" games, as you wouldn't buy them anyway? And just pay for the 5% that are good? Oh, but you don't pay for those either, do you?
Looks like you want to work in our industry. And the industry is small. Don't forget that you and your classmates are biting the hand(s) that may feed you in the future. By pirating games, you are depriving people of income. It's not a victimless crime. Nothing's free.
James King>
IP laws stupid? How do you propose to "reform" patent and copyright laws? Make everything free and open source?
Did it ever occur to you that without copyright and patent laws, there would be no e-sports and "the best Starcraft players in the world"? Whether its the CPU or GPU in the or the (pirated) OS running the (pirated) copy of Starcraft, all of those products exist because they are afforded protections under intellectual property laws. Without those protections and the right to exploit the fruits of your hard labor, do you think that individuals or companies will invest years of R&D to make those products?
B N>
At the height of the Napster craze, people said the same thing about people paying money for mp3's. Apple and iTunes has shown that people are willing to pay for downloadable content if it's priced right.
And why don't you want to talk about your "various deep reasons/beliefs?" You obviously have an interesting take on this piracy topic- why don't you explain to us how you justify your parasitic existence?
Eric/James/BN, if you actually made a living making video games, you would have a different attitude than your apologist's views on piracy.
I have some games, some original, those that after playing a pirate version I felt that the dev should get some money, and some are pirate and I will not buy a original version of them anytime soon... Why? It is because my salary as Game Designer and Programmer do not pay them... Yes, exacly, the game price is higher than my ENTIRE month of work...
Happily I am managing to get rid of most pirated software \o/ I for example use OpenOffice instead of MSOffice, and in fact I prefer it... I also use Blender instead of Max or Maya, and that goes on... Unfortunally several companies demands Max or Maya, and universities for some obscure reason insist in refusing to use or allow the use of OpenSource software, result: On my university for example, instead of all students knowing Blender, all students know Max and Maya and have pirate versions of them... (I also have too, mainly because the university does not have structure to serve all students at same time and asks works done on those software... So we have pirated versions or we do not make our homework and get blasted...)
Piracy is a victimless crime because pirates wouldn't buy the stuff under normal circumstances.
I do make a living in the video game industry as a programmer and my view is the same as it always has been on piracy. The games wouldn't have been sold anyway to the pirates so no one is being hurt. Someone is however getting some fun out of the game that normally wouldn't, and how can you argue with a little more fun in the world? You can't so stop being so serious.
The great thing about our digital age is that people from all walks of life can experience the same things and have the same fun no matter their financial situation because the digital age doesn't take physical resources to make duplicates. It is all bytes and bits and code that someone created at one time, but can be infinitely reproduced. To me that is very exciting. It is a win win situation. The companies get sell their stuff while people that normally wouldn't experience or be able to experience something can pirate it and take up no resources in the process. The companies are happy with what they sold (they wouldn't sell any more if piracy didn't exist), and others are happy as well. It seems just as wrong to me to be able to continue to take money from people for something forever that is infinitely reproducible and requires no resources (especially regarding digital downloads since no CD/Casing/Manuals/etc).
I fail to see how you can argue with more joy in the world. You enjoy crime? You would like your mom to robbed and then shot on a street corner so a drug addict could get their fix? Imagine if drugs didn't require actual resources and could be downloaded over the internet. Your mom lives and the drug addict is happy. Sure, I took it to an extreme, but the idea is the same when something is resourceless and infinitely reproducible all you're doing by allowing people to get their hands on this stuff is making the world a better place so the developers should be proud no matter how their creation is distributed.
I would be interested in seeing that approach adopted by game publishers. I can't see any major arguments against this, given that illegal games for USD 1 are already available and ubiquitous.
Sorry, but pretending to work for the very industry that you pirate from shows nothing other than your inherent lack of understanding of how it effects this industry and how it will later effect it. You think games are expensive now? You have not see ANYTHING yet. Maybe when digital distribution takes hold these parasites will finally be weeded out since in order to get games (or to even run them) you will have to be tied to the network of the provider of the hardware. I know there will eventually be a work around but making it tougher to pirate will make it much more difficult for even the semi-tech conscious individual.
There is no ethical battle over IP infringement or price gouging...etc.
It's all besides the point. Koreans are not very much into the abstract question of wheter it is right to do so but rather "Can I do it? What is stopping me?"
Watch how people drive here and you'll understand what I mean.
So our industry, instead of suing our customers. Instead of driving away customers with DRM which will be broken anyways took the most practical routes:
1) A way to authenticate that is unseen and unfelt by the normal customer.
2) Distribute free but charge for convenience/aesthetic features.
The practical way to make money when completely self-contained standalone products will somehow in someway be free is to not make it self contained. TO require connection.
To make that requirement a plus.
TO play with the practical limits of human perception. We can easily calculate and evaluate lump sums/batch prices. Judgements arise easier when you can evaluate a dozen brown eggs at a singular price to your budget. However, buying candy everytime your sweet tooth feels itchy...? A lollipop there, a caramel corn here. Not so easy to budget.
So we skip the entire scaring our customer base away, suing them (which essentially scares them away too) or complicating the process to just playing the game. We skip the moralizing. We skip the lawsuits. We skip the rootkits.
If you want to make money. Adjust to your customers. Do not expect them to adjust to you. That's the future, present, and the past of any freaking retail industry.
This is nothing new. The philosophical arguments are those between dinosaurs debating how they will either starve, freeze, or burn to death because none of the conditions are able to sustain their girth, their appetite, and optimal temps.
While the primates simply try to eat no matter what the conditions and thus evolve.
Game prices really haven't gone up much over the years (compared to lots of other things) I remember Nintendo games costing 40-50. Anyway piracy has nothing to do with rising costs. It is about how much the game costs to make and as technology gets better and graphics become as good as they can get games as we know them today (controller/tv) will start to cost less to make in turn lowering game prices if anything. So future price raises are the least of our worries in the game industry.
the only way to fight piracy is to switch to 100% online distribution. Nintendo could market a storage device equivalent to the linkers but without amovible cards or PC interface, that could download content using the Wi-Fi service.
once manufacturing, logistic and retailer costs are out of the picture the end-user price of games can plunder. if a legit service is cheap and convenient then piracy loses its raison d'etre. +, if games were dematerialized N could explore alternative pricing models (ex. get game for a couple of days for cheap, subscribe for recurring fee, sell micro-content for games...). IMO this will be a win-win-win for consumers, developers and nintendo.
The current situation is not bad for nintendo though who is effectively using linkers to build a user base.
Sorry but you're just plain wrong. About 1/3 of the DS and PSP owners I know pirate every single title they want to play, regardless of whether they think it might be great or crap; they simply do not want to pay for games. As another anonymous poster said, this is only hurting the people (such as myself) trying to make a living within the industry. It is hard enough for developers to keep their doors open, and piracy issues only make things more difficult. It might be tough on your brain, but do the math:
Potential sales - piracy = less revenue = less games being made = your "crappy game" situation getting worse.
Eventually, you will have nothing to play. Kudos.
"I cannot afford it, therefore I shall not play it. For the glory of the industry, i will sacrifice my fun!"
The guy is a gamer. He wants to play, but still has to pay his bills. If he can pay them and still play Mario Galaxy through a pirated copy, he'll do it.
If games where at least officially distributed, the prices would drop by half or more.
Online distribution? If, for instance, someone wants to buy a game in Wiiware, the person will need an international credit card or she'll have to buy a wii points card on an eBay-like site (mostly untrustable).
The music industry tried to keep it's old ways in an ever-changing world and look at them. Are we heading the same way?
I own a PSP and I pirate nearly every game like the people you said you know. Thing is if I couldn't have pirated I would have never bought a PSP therefore I would have never bought a PSP game. So again, piracy doesn't hurt the companies because the people pirating wouldn't buy the stuff if they couldn't pirate.
"If piracy is so high it's because the retail prices for the games are too high. Game companies need to lower prices to find a happy point where people will buy games rather than pirate to maximise their profit."
Consider that by doing so, they'd be shifting the issue: customers of country A would get their consoles from country B which is in the same local region.
As a measure of protection, products would become even more regionalized, regions would be segmented into smaller zones.
BN:
It is true that a pirate wouldn't buy a game. So by pirating, a pirate is doing nothing illogical regarding its status. However, its existence as a pirate, instead of being a customer, is what makes the difference.
You are merely trying to find excuses to make legit your unethical habits.
This sumus it well:
"Actually I don't pirate that 5% of games that I believe are good. I just bought MGS4 because I think it deserves it, but that is the only game in about 2 years that deserves it to me."
Which means, basically, that before MGS4, the last time you actually bought a game was two years ago. Now, you're not going to tell me you've kept playing the same game(s) for two years, right?
So you obviously downloaded a good load of just plain terrible games, all part of that 95%. Now, since they were that mediocre, why would you pay for them?
What about the likely fact that you've spent dozens upon dozens of hours playing games you didn't buy? I suppose they were so horrible that they weren't worth your money, but either because you're masochist or you have bad tastes, you still played them for that long.
Or back to option 1: you didn't buy any new game within two years, and only played these old games until MGS4.
Neither being sensical, nor honest.
"I own a PSP and I pirate nearly every game like the people you said you know. Thing is if I couldn't have pirated I would have never bought a PSP therefore I would have never bought a PSP game. So again, piracy doesn't hurt the companies because the people pirating wouldn't buy the stuff if they couldn't pirate."
Or: "Hey, I bought the console and pirated only a hundred games. It's all positive for Sony, since I wouldn't buy their games anyway haha!"
Of course, if everybody behaved that way, each PSP would need to be sold at $10,000 to recoup costs and give the devs what they deserve rightfully. But then, the outrageous price of the PSP would be another oh formidable excuse to pirate it.
By the way, let's consider what would happen if you bought a PS3:
"Hey Sony, I'm helping you recouping your $3.3 billion losses! How kind of me."
*runs trying to catch his eyes which have rolled out of their sockets*
To be honest I really haven't spent much time playing my pirated games. I have tons of them, but I still don't play them often because most of them just aren't good games. Some of them I have never played. This is the beauty of the digital age things can be infinitely reproduced for no physical resource cost so it shouldn't cost me to reproduce it myself. Great, someone made game A at one time in history, and now they want to tell me I can't reproduce it when it costs no one anything and it is just 0's and 1's. They can sit back and make infinite copies of this for no cost and basically they have their own money mint. That right there is wrong and like using a cheat code in life for infinite ammo.
Also your little saying here:
"Hey, I bought the console and pirated only a hundred games. It's all positive for Sony, since I wouldn't buy their games anyway haha!"
is true it is all positive for Sony since I wouldn't have bought the system in the first place if pirating didn't exist thereby not helping Sony at all. At least with the existence of piracy I'm helping them a little bit. So the company's situation either gets better by a little or stays the same. I think we know which they would prefer.
Anyway, it is pathetic to defend multi-billion dollar companies with everything else going on in the world, give me a break. I'm not heart broken for not helping Sony Exec 033 pay for their third yaught, I won't lose sleep over that. Being a good business man is 90% knowing how to steal so don't get all preachy on me at how I'm wrong and Mr. Big Business is right.
Once you've paid for it, of course. Which you don't.
"Great, someone made game A at one time in history, and now they want to tell me I can't reproduce it when it costs no one anything and it is just 0's and 1's. They can sit back and make infinite copies of this for no cost and basically they have their own money mint. That right there is wrong and like using a cheat code in life for infinite ammo."
No, it's called work and business. Making goods, by recruiting people, using their talents and paying them, and selling these goods in return. I'm not going to hide the fact that I'm convinced economy and humanism are totally opposed, and a balance has to be found. But until we grow absolutely everything on trees, from tellies to shoes, our world is governed by the economy. That balance, developpers get closer to it by having a job (most of the time under absolute atrocious work conditions... but apparently you're a hero if you work 80 hours a week and a shameful lazy ass pariah if you ask for working at only 40 hours a week) and getting paid for what they do, to have a life, buy food, have a house and eventually have fun outside of their work because you shouldn't live in order to work.
In the end, these goods, pure entertainment if you may, are not a necessity at all. Would it be food or water, I would definitely be open to argumentation. But there is no argumentation to find there. You simply don't want to pay for what you steal, and you're pulling excuses which, if anything, just feed your delusions.
I just want to point out that your exquisite plaid would fall in pieces if you had bought your PS3 at a time where each unit was a loss to Sony. At that moment, you'd have not been of any use to them. You are of no help at all. Pirating games does not help companies. They jsut become even more trigger happy to put DRMs and taxes on anything, like frakin takes on plenty of memory supports because of piracy.
Now, I am in no way trying to defend the big ugly capitilist money making machine, because I'm convinced that they're abusers of a whole other part of the system as well, and are in a position of power which is not compensated.
But you don't realize that those games that you pirate, people have been making them, and that has nothing to do with Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft or any publisher. That has to do with the very companies like the one you work in. Even more for independant studios, no matter their size. We can fully see the lack of logic and common sense in your position, in that you're participating to the death of the companies which gives you a job and money. For some people, working in these companies is even a dream. Your stance couldn't be more ridiculous.
So what are you going to say? You live in a country which is an economical disaster? Bizarrely, you have not used the poverty argument yet, so something tells me it doesn't apply to you.
Would this be your copout? I can perfectly understand people living in Argentina, in Brazil, Bangladesh, Cuba or some other poor countries in Africa or Asia that their jobs are paid with peanuts, so they would pirate games sold at prices which defy their purchase power. It's not good, but their whole situation is terrible, so you can't expect things to go right there until bigger problems get properly settled.
Even if you are one of them and it doesn't work for you, I've seen people from wealthy countries hold the same arguments. It certainly works for them.
I think there's nothing much to add anyway.
Consider that by doing so, they'd be shifting the issue: customers of country A would get their consoles from country B which is in the same local region.
If you lower the price of _legal_ games in a country like Argentina, you're still increasing the price of games there in general. Where before games were available for USD 1, they're now (after massive anti-piracy drive coupled with Eastern Economy Edition legal prices) available legally for USD 5 (or whatever).
I reckon that anyone who would travel the distance to buy the cheap and legal USD 5 versions would've been buying the illegal USD 1 versions before that anyway. Not that I think that many people would travel real distances to buy games. I think the bigger fear for the publishers would be middlemen buying in bulk in a cheap country and selling them on for the normal price in an expensive country. But as I mentioned, book publishers are doing it on the Indian sub-continent; dunno if they're having any problems with it.
The bottom line is that you're a thief. You can employ all the fallacious logic you want, but at the end of the day you are taking something that doesn't belong to you because you have some warped sense of entitlement. Your flimsy logic doesn’t hold up to the scrutiny of common sense and regardless, even assuming your logic was sound, that still doesn’t justify taking something that isn’t yours. When somebody writes a book, records a song, or makes a videogame, they deserved to be paid for their work and enjoy the residuals of their efforts. You justify your theft by claiming that 95% of all games are “crap”, which seems like a feeble way to validate your unethical behavior.
Whether or not you would actually purchase the games you steal is incidental; you steal them regardless as do many, many other people. If these games are as void of quality as you so arrogantly proclaim, why play them at all?
The answer: Because they are worth playing or you wouldn’t bother. In other words, you are a liar.
Ultimately, what you steal may not overtly affect the industry but your mentality and actions don’t help it either. Most people who break the law and steal rationalize it but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s wrong. As somebody who literally spends thousands of dollars on this medium every year, I find your behavior offensive and your specious justifications repugnant. That you steal is bad enough but the fact that you have the audacity to come into an industry forum and arrogantly flaunt that behavior is nauseating.
Look it really comes down to our class alignment. You say you spend thousands in this industry per year so of course you look negatively on pirates. Not many people can spend that much per year on an entertainment industry, you are lucky. You must have a good job and good life and I bet you had a good childhood as well. It all starts with family, and some people can't be fortunate enough to be born with a silver spoon of love in their mouth. Love equals success and a different view of the world. I can't magically make you understand people so different from your life, but you should be smart enough and aware enough to realize that some things transcend simply wrong or right. So basically what am I trying to say? That neither I am wrong or you are wrong its just our view of the world and our own reality there really is no end all be all view because all angles can be debated from several other angles and it could go on forever into infinite layers of complexity. So I'll leave it at just be open minded and try to understand other people's views instead trying to skew their views into your own.
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