Piratebay don't host trackers anymore, they haven't for years. Honestly if piracy is hurting companies so much, how are they still operating today? I've never heard of WB, Dreamworks, Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft saying "We're shutting down, no one bought our products" I think many places and reports are dramatising. There's heaps of people who still buy products, if they stopped spending time on stupid DRM practices they might have more time making better products that people will pay for. It's not even like Undergroundgamer had current gen files, it was more of an archive than anything!
What you have to remember is that we're on a forum that includes content creators. Whilst copyright holders deal with piracy in different ways, you have to respect those who choose to take a stand against it - it's their bread and butter. If someone did something that directly affected your wages, wouldn't you be upset? If you work in a bakery that makes 100 loaves of bread a day, it's OK for a small amount of people to come in and steal a loaf as long as you sell some... right?! Copyright holders can and do sell old titles on new platforms. Wii Virtual Console, PSN, Xbox Live Arcade, Google Play, iTunes App Store etc. It doesn't mean that every old title will see a new release - some publishers choose to give old games away, or sometimes they're just forgotten. It doesn't change the fact that they COULD sell them, though... or that there are people who won't buy them if they can get them for free.
You know that they use a different word for copyright infringement and this word is piracy, right? If piracy would be stealing there would be no need for a different word and no dictionary in the world brings piracy and stealing as a synonym. You can't steal what you can duplicate ad infinitum. You are pirating it not stealing it.
It is more than just the physical item being duplicated. The item cost money to make, especially as programmers and such have to be paid. If you, as a programmer, worked for a company whose products were pirated and the company had to close, you would lose out. Likewise, if you as a baker or baker's assistant had bread stolen, it would affect your profit and the place might have to shut. Regardless of what product people make, they put time and effort into it and are proud of it. It is quite soul destroying to have been part of a team who created something, only to see someone steal it. As the old Eighties ads said, piracy is theft. You are not paying for the product that you know you should pay for, therefore it is the same as stealing.
I have to agree with retro. I feel like this argument has existed on the internet for far too long...Sure it's not a 1:1 representation of stealing of physical property. It is however stealing of intellectual property if it's for sale and you're not paying them for it.
Your arguments aren't valid. It's bad as stealing so it's stealing. Killing is bad as rape so rape = killing and, of course, those are two different things. As I explained, it's not stealing it's piracy. I'm just sorting the logic here not promoting piracy. I have tons of arguments of why piracy is great for the world but I'm not going to do so on this particular forum. BTW: unless you got yourself permit by Nintendo, your own avatar is a copyright infringement. The sonic character on the banner it's another example. But, clearly we are not hear to harm any employee of any company.
I am game developer, and I was paid for the job. I don't care, when somebody downloads games, I've took part in. There is more to it - if people downloading game, it is good. I can't agree, that piracy is stealing, this is wrong. Person, who actually downloaded game will never buy it otherwise. But in case of bad game sales, publishers has to blame somebody - and "pirates" are very nice candidate for this. Did you ever seen, that companies of successful games saying everything about piracy? I don't think so. What is also disappointing, is that modern games mostly centralized about money. This is no more about games, this is more of quick profits. I am not talking about all game studios, but I am talking about around 80% of them. And I was in one of these studios. As of underground-gamer, it was about old games, abandonware, trying to properly organize game collections, gather information about this or that game. There were a lot of passionate people, and now all of us need to search some new place to be.
For someone in Michigan, your English sounds very... foreign. If you are really in the industry, you would know that abandonware is a flimsy excuse. Look at the Wii Virtual Console - lots of old games get re-releases on there. Whilst it is true some developers sort of embrace piracy, no programmer would not worry about the negative repercussions that it could have on the company that pays them, and their ability to get further pay cheques in this day and age, when development studios are dropping like flies. Crazy, your argument, whilst it has some merit, is largely invalid nowadays. A lot of games are released with demos, especially on Steam or a console market, which will show you whether it will run on your PC and whether it is any good. Those people who would never pay for the games regardless are of very little use to anyone in the industry. The people you want to target are more like those who go for Humble Bundle deals - they don't fancy paying full price, but they'll pay something for a game. Anyway, I'm done with this. As always, mention piracy and the trolls come out. At least Fandangos seems to see my point - this forum isn't the place for advocating piracy, when developers are amongst us.
True, I recently relocated to USA. I was in industry, but I left professional gamedev, I was doing crappy casual games, but publisher had good profit of it anyway. I with my friend working on some own projects, and I must say, that all of publishers and developers, we've contacted doesn't care about old stuff. Few of them even lost source code for these old games, which is something, that should never happen. I am buying every humble bundle, just because it's cheap, and I always support games which I like. I am not advocating piracy, but I don't think piracy harm gamedev companies at all, and this is not about stealing, this is about "possibly decreased income", which is impossible to prove.
To the defenders: Media piracy is like being a peeping tom. You receive pleasure from someone without their consent, whether you think it affects them or not. If a creator feels they're being violated when you peek at their goods, they are, end of discussion. Stop ignorantly justifying a dirty habit because you feel entitled. Almost everybody pirates one thing or another, but I'm always amazed by those who gloat about their dirty deeds. The least you can do is keep it to yourself out of respect to the creators, and as common courtesy so people don't have to know what a prick you are. Also: -nobody can definitively say what people will or will not buy in the absence of piracy. You can only speak for yourself. -not everyone is salaried. For a self-publisher piracy is almost certain to incur significant losses. (Not even necessarily profit!)
Interesting stuff. No disrespect to you, of course - relocation to a country with a foreign tongue is no mean feat. I don't think I could do it! And, of course, there's no shame in making casual games. It still pays the bills, and if you are passionate about games, it's a foot in the door, too. Very true. I think the self publishers are affected today more than ever. We're seeing an increase in self publishing with the rise of mobile gaming, which is great. However, it is another area where piracy is sadly rife. Whilst disc-based games are often very expensive, it's very sad that people feel games that sell for only a few dollars aren't worth buying. If you think about even minimum wage (a wage that a talented programmer should easily be exceeding) of £6.19 an hour here and that most games are somewhere between 60p and £2, minus the cut from the likes of Google and Apple and perhaps a developer's subscription on top, you do need to sell a lot of copies to even make up all those hours you put into development.
I said I would abstain but it seems you people that said the same are still arguing so I'll post: I wonder what's your opinion on digital preservation that were only possible by piracy. Groups like Redump, Tosec, Trurip and many others gathered, documented, cataloged and preserved whole libraries of material. And works like MAME which are founded on piracy. Besides the preservation I don't think many of people who live on the north of America remembers the world wasn't rich as it is today. Now remember your live back in the 90s and transform that into much less and you will have the 90s on South America. Teachers were only possible to show their students Kurosawa, Fellini, Kubrick movies because they pirated it. They copied from a VHS tape to another. Or they would need to pay $100 for a VHS tape of a better movie. Of course terrible movies would cost less but still would cost a lot. Students that are poor can only read books because of Xerox machines and this still holds for today. But we are talking about games. When the brazilian current currency started the minimum income were R$64. You would need 2 months of labor to buy a game. Without piracy there would be no game industry on all countries in the South America up to 2002. Luckily those times are over and the world feels more like one today where people here gets the same amount as people on the North. Still you seem to forget the education, the preservation, the world opening itself for people that could get none from it. I see no reason why poor people should be put to jail for watching movies that they could never afford or getting the $250,000 fine from a pirated copy of a game. And games that sell for a $1 on play store usually get their income from ads or game DLC.
It was even worse in my childhood. While your parents are at work to be able to give better life to you, you're watching store shelves with pirated orange chinese famicom-like cartridges for pirate game console called Dendy (which was NES rip-off in my area). And prices for these cartridges were crazy, with salary like $50-$100 you couldn't afford it. Nobody was even thinking, that all of this was pirated, and sold to us as genuine content. The only way of playing games was to buy few cartridges, complete them, and exchange with other people. Usually you didn't had much choice what to play, your games library was limited to pirates, who couldn't dump all games, 60% of them were in Japanese, which I didn't understood. And obviously you want to play games, but you didn't had other choice but to buy these cartridges, complete and exchange them. Then I got Sega Mega Drive. I was sure it was genuine until I got the thing called "Internet", and I found out, that my console was hi-quality clone of Japanese version of Sega Mega Drive. All cartridges were pirated too. We didn't got much of SNES, because it was very difficult to clone it at that time, and only some families had SNES, sent to them by rich Europe/US relatives. Same was for N64. PlayStation however was very popular in Ukraine, but you couldn't buy non-chipped console anywhere . All "retailers" were selling chipped PSX's ready for running any types of discs, and obviously everything was pirated there. Due to all these facts, I lost a lot of gaming experience with a lot of different consoles, which I am kinda trying to catch up now. I also recall German RTL channel with cartoons, which we were watching often. Between cartoons there were amazing ads with things like GameBoy, Mario (at that time we even didn't had NES clones), I was suspecting, that this was game console, which you could take with you anywhere, it was so wonderful, and so inaccessible...
Digital preservation is about spreading METADATA, not the data (media) itself. In practice the two go hand in hand, which I abhor, because it gave rise to this self-righteous preservationist attitude. The affordability/availability of media is irrelevant. This is a binary issue; you have the right to media, granted by the publisher and creator, or you do not. Obviously piracy has the ability to enrich people's lives by giving them entertainment, education, etc. That doesn't make it just.
If you believe in democracy and democracy is the will of the many over the few piracy is justice. In South America many more families are fed with piracy than families of film makers or game developers. There are small stands with DVD-R everywhere here. Much more names got their income this way than the names credited on any Lord of the Rings/Titanic/God of War etc. Still, piracy is fading, slowly but it is and won't exist in a decade or so. With services like Netflix, spotify and many others piracy will end but those services were only created because the media industry would bleed to death without it.
The problem here is that society used to create culture for culture's sake, and now society creates culture with the expectation of profit. Works created obviously take a lot more labor now, but that doesn't mean the people who consume this culture will necessarily feel any different about it. Not being able to consume the culture of one's peers also ostracizes one from society. It's much more complicated than "people want free shit." It's sociological. You say that preservation is about metadata. But what you are suggesting is akin to libraries throwing out all of their books and just keeping their card catalogs (i.e. metadata). Video games are the culture of my generation. They ought to be preserved, and if we wait until the copyright has expired, there is no legitimate chance of preservation. Copyright length in the US is 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter. Cartridges will not survive for that long, so they must be backed up to another medium, which in itself may not even be legal in many circumstances, again, due to outrageous copyright laws. Please don't equate justice with the law, because, unfortunately, such a comparison is absurd.
Preservation efforts ARE about metadata, without metadata the data itself cannot be validated. Validation allows you to scavenge and efficiently transmit binary, which as everyone's eager to point out will be "all that's left", at your discretion. There's no need for mass illegal distribution of data today since once it's validated that will happen at the individual level. Also the most important data to people already has been archived, albeit not often in pristine form. The current distribution channels don't help matters by pushing terabytes of un-pristine data to warez kiddies for safe keeping. Like anybody I don't like to see things lost to time, but I'm not presumptuous enough to believe I have rights to the data/information I did not legitimately obtain. Data is property. Oh, and here's a good one to remember: life isn't fair.
