Split-Screen :: The Game-Geek’s Daily Read

by gSathe

The first thing to do, we’ve got to stop calling it piracy. Piracy sounds cool, piracy is Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightley. Piracy sounds sexy. So let’s just call it what it is – stealing.

Don’t get me wrong. We’ve all bought pirated discs, we’ve played games and watched movies and listened to music, all for a fraction of their price. And there are many reasons and many justifications, and a lot of them actually even make sense.

But it’s really important that we recognise that piracy is theft.

I write for a living. I write on a website for a living, and so the way I see it, when someone copy-pastes my work to use as their own, I’m being screwed! But at least all of my text was already up there and free. If I was on a paid subscription model, and someone copy pasted all of my work, then I’d be getting screwed and robbed!

The real problem is in the nature of the product here. When you buy a book, or a movie, or a video game, what do you really get? The actual, physical product, or the content, the data? If I buy a Halo disc, is it wrong to let my friend borrow it and play it on his own console?Of course not.

But say I duplicate the disc myself, so that we now have two copies of Halo which both of us can use at the same time. It’s such a small step from sharing a disc to copying it after all – in both cases, my friend, who hasn’t paid the creators for the product, gets to play – but by doing this I’m a buccaneer, a pirate sailing the seas, I’m Cap’n Jack Sparrow, arr matey, and most of all, I’ve just stolen.

I keep coming back to stolen because that’s the most important point, and the one which is glossed over all the time. It’s not stealing, it’s making a copy. If you do that to money you’re a counterfeiter. It’s true that it’s easy not to see this as theft, since you’re not taking the original away from the person who owns it, are you?

So let’s just do a little math.

An official with Nintendo was quoted in the New York Times stating that Nintendo and its game developers and publishers may have lost $762 million to video game piracy in 2006.

The Electronic Software Association Anti-Piracy FAQ says that the total losses in 2006 due to video game piracy amount to $3.0 billion. Italy is the global leader in piracy, at $817 million, then China at $589.9 million, followed by Spain at $510.5 million and South Korea at $461.9 million. At $129.9 million, India falls within the top ten, according to a report by the International Intellectual Property Alliance.

This was two years ago by the way, later figures are still being compiled. Two years ago, while the video game industry was already big (it’s been huge for a while though) doesn’t even begin to compare with 2007. Last year the consoles reached every far corner of the Earth, including (Hallelujah!) India, the Holiday season last year saw a record breaking run of AAA titles, the number of games which (not including piracy) sold over a million titles was a record high and also last year, the video game industry overtook the US economy and became the fastest growing sector in an otherwise bad economy. So if piracy has also grown to keep pace with the game industry, and there’s no reason to think it hasn’t, then the total amount lost to the people who make the games is staggering.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favour of cheaper games. If I have to pay, I’d rather pay a little, no, a lot less. But unless that money goes to the people who make the games, we’re not going to see a lot of new games.

Mohit Anand, who until recently was Country Manager for Entertainment and Devices at Microsoft had this to say about software piracy - “Intellectual property rights lie at the heart of investment, innovation and technological advances that drive the industry’s growth, employment and opportunity. Video game piracy hurts everyone – from game developers to the retail store-owners and ultimately all consumers.”

Take away the jargon and what it boils down to is this: “You copy. I don’t get money. I don’t make more games. You copy. Store owners don’t make money. They don’t sell more games. You copy. You don’t get more games.”

Still not clear? Okay then. Let’s take a specific instance.

It’s hard to say how many people have even heard of Beyond Good and Evil. If you’re one of the three people who just said, “Aha! Nietzsche!” then you need to catch up to the 21st century. If you’re one of the four people who thought of the innovative, rewarding and downright great video game by Michael Ancel (the same twisted genius who thought up Rayman) then go to the head of the class!

It was practically the darling of the review circuit, and there was really a lot to recommend the game. But if you were to look it up online, then you can find it in the Wikipedia list of commercial failures in video gaming. Right next to the N-Gage.

So why did a game that seemed to have everything going for it bomb more than George W Bush in Iraq?

Piracy is a favoured answer. Most gamers certainly played the game. But most of them didn’t buy it either, if we’re to listen to UbiSoft. And we should really listen to Ubi – they’re one of the good guys in game making, and while they’re just as guilty as everyone else in pulling sequels out of hats, I don’t hold it against them. Not when they also keep making new and innovative games.

According to Ubisoft, the commercial sales of Beyond Good and Evil (on the PC, PS2 and X-Box) were disappointing. So either everyone who puts up a say online bought the game and no one else did, or a lot of copies of that game were circulated without being bought.

And so, one of the more interesting new titles in an industry that’s often criticised for the lack of innovation in gameplay never grew into a franchise. The anticipated sequel which was talked about early on never even got into planning. And Jade, the heroine of Beyond Good and Evil, a lead female who was the anti-thesis of Lara Croft, faded into oblivion.

But for all that, piracy does have its advantages. You can’t find Beyond Good and Evil in any store. Go to Music World or any other shop like that and ask them if they have it. You won’t get in on any of the platforms. Go down to Palika Bazaar after that. It might take a little time, and a little effort, but you will get the game on all the three platforms it was made for.

So software theft means that the only way to get hold of a game killed by piracy is – by piracy!

There’s a lot of places to get pirated discs, but the center of it all is Palika Bazaar. We enter into a world of first names, and a shopkeeper there, who is known only as Yusuf, tells me, “If piracy is wrong then why do I have so many customers. Every day I am selling a minimum of 100 discs. Some people will pick up only one disc in a month or two, others come and buy three of four games every second day. All these people are coming because pirated discs are the only options we have.”

And he has a point. Many top line games release months later in India, or not at all. Beyond Good and Evil never released in stores here, so the only way to get the game was via piracy. Ironically enough, the reason that the game was not released it because Ubisoft’s company policy is against releasing games in India – because there’s too much piracy here!

Another shopkeeper in Palika Bazaar gave some more insight into the business. Again declining to cross beyond a first name, Balwinder was quite frank in admitting video game piracy is theft - “That’s why I got out of it. Too much tension about the police. Everyday almost we had to give them a cut. Again and again we’d have to close up because half an hour before we get a call from the police telling us they have to make a raid. Same old tired joke. Of course we made good money, but it wasn’t worth the headache you see.”

All smiles he tells me, “The big business now is selling the hardware. We’ll sell the consoles to anyone, mod them so that they run the pirated games, and we sell all the add-ons, extra wires and controllers. We don’t sell duplicate games anymore, only originals because it’s easier that way. But we’ll change the console and make sure that you can run the fake games, because everyone wants to do that. Around five or six X-Boxes are modded every day.”

Most shops don’t even sell five or six X-Box 360s in a single day. But Palika Bazaar has its own gravity, and most things gaming in Delhi happen here.

A third shopkeeper in Palika Bazaar, a young man called Bunty, asks me, “People see that a game is on sale for three thousand rupees. Then they see that it’s here for fifty, maybe a hundred. So which one do you think that they will buy?”

It’s hard to argue with him. While I agree that pricing a video game title with a base value of Rs 1500, reaching Rs 3000 for some makes it very hard to keep up with everyone’s favourite pastime, it still is stealing, it’s still not right to duplicate games. But oh Captain Jack, you bloody pirate, you make it seem like the only sensible option.

There are a few things working against piracy actually. The internet is the key thing. As more and more games go online, piracy isn’t a working option. And also people are starting to realise that India is a real market for video games. The way Microsoft has handled the X-Box 360 here is proof of that. Games are actually releasing on time here, much to everyone’s shock.

Now if someone would just fix the pricing, piracy might actually go down. Until then, we’ll just keep reminding everyone that it is theft, and hope that that sinks in. And hope that we get a choice in the matter sometime soon. Because as Balwinder with-no-last-name-said, “People want to buy the original version of games. They just don’t want to spend more than their monthly house rent to buy those games.”