Dirty Deeds: Piracy on the PSX

[zapiy]

Piracy divides opinion, read this article https://www.retrovideogamer.co.uk/dirty-deeds-piracy-on-the-psx/ and tell us your thoughts and opinions on the subject?

[onthinice]

A really well written article that hits close to home for me. My friends and I shared copies of Commodore 64 games.

It was the middle 1980's and blank floppies were easier to come by than money to purchase actual games. There were a few exceptions that always seemed to frustrate us. Games like Pirates and the series of Dungeons & Dragons required certain passwords or codes to be able to load the games. In the case of Pirates, we all had our own copies. Which is funny since the game is about high seas piracy. LOL.

I am more into sci-fi games so Buck Rodgers was my choice over D&D games. But buying the actual game seemed to offer more than a pirated game. The actual game was more expensive but the packaging was a bonus and it came with a book from the Buck Rodgers series. There are nine books in total. Felt like a good purchase all the way around.

Being older when the Playstation came out probably dampened my thrill of modding a system or pirating games. The PS one is a good system but it has never been on my list to have a complete collection of games. Same for Saturn, Xbox, GameCube and other disc based systems. Must be growing up as it just is not exciting to own burnt cd-r's or have hard drives full of every game.

[TrekMD]

I remember copying diskette games in the early days of Windows from friends.  One of us would by and then the others would copy and we took turns.  It was just too easy to do at the time, for better or worse.  If something was problematic to copy, we just bought it then.  Then there was all the shareware that was available. That's how I learned of Wolfenstein 3D!

I never had a C64 or any home computer prior to my first 386 PC (with a whopping 16 MB hard drive!), so never had the chance to do the same with that machine. 

Like the author of the article, I should have known better but I was young and didn't really realize how damaging this was to smaller companies. 

[zapiy]

I have to agree, the article more or less hits the nail on the head for me. I am not going to lie, I did do some piracy back in the day. For the most part, it was way to easy back then.

[TrekMD]

Yeah, the ease of it helped, which is why now there are all these encripted programs that make it so difficult now. 

[davyk]

 A good article. I'm split on the issue. I have certainly availed of it in the past and anyone who uses an emulator could also be accused of it.

There were arguments that the PS1 being cracked actually helped it but I'm not sure of that. The fact is the less people pay for new content the greater the risk of losing content providers.

An argument in its favour is that people play games they would never buy anyhow - I agree with that but once the line is crossed and people get pirated copies instead of paying for a game they want then it can be riskier. It would come down to publishers meeting sales targets. If piracy affects target sales figures then it can impact on content being created. If piracy doesn't affect target sales then it wouldn't matter as much how many pirated copies are out there - although it would obviously still hurt profits.

I'm a collector myself so owning pirated copies of games has no interest to me.

Piracy can be used for try-before-you-buy. I have done that with Dreamcast games. But the argument of pirating something because you think it is OK doesn't really wash with me. These are luxury items - you don't need them. By all means pirate but accept it is wrong and don't try to justify it.

A legal fact that many people don't get is that even owning a physical copy of the game doesn't mean you own it. That copy comes with a licence to play that game on that piece of media. That's all. You do not own a copy of the game, only the right to play that game. So even making backups for your own use isn't strictly legal. It's impossible to police of course - that's why digital distribution is such a popular publishing model now that the technology enables it.