My name is Arol, and I support videogame piracy.
To clarify, I don’t support piracy as a blanket option for those too cheap to pay for their games – the precious few companies that actually look out for their customers deserve every penny they make. I support piracy in individual cases where gamers are left without a reasonable legal alternative.
I wholeheartedly believe that if a company doesn’t make their games readily available for legal purchase then they have no business getting their knickers in a twist when people turn to torrents. It’s that simple.
Where things get complicated is with piracy as a protest against DRM. In principle I support it – in my eyes, nothing justifies piracy more.
If developers and publishers think PC gamers are being unreasonable in wanting our games to be stable and spyware free, then I say they’re being unreasonable in wanting us to pay for them.
Plus, DRM does NOT prevent piracy. Never has, never will. Pirated games have the DRM removed. What DRM prevents is lending, reselling and in some cases even replaying old games. You know, legal stuff. It can also conflict with firewalls and render games unplayable.
When DRM only harms those who pay for their games you can hardly blame people for seeking out an alternative.
In theory, piracy is a perfectly legitimate form of protest.
Unfortunately, in practice it doesn’t really work. While gamers, developers and publishers alike know perfectly well that piracy is a symptom of DRM and not a cause – you only have to look at the Humble Bundles to see that – devs and publishers will always use it to justify their bullshit.
So I’m going to talk about Mass Effect 3 again. It’s far from being the only relevant game but it is the most current and a product of the PC gamer’s arch nemesis: Electronic Arts.
I would pirate Mass Effect 3 in a heartbeat were it not for that fact that a) I wish to maintain some sort of moral high ground over EA and BioWare and b) this is EA we’re talking about and if I were to pirate one of their games the best case scenario for me would be to open the door to a couple of burly men with a hobbling post.
After the DRM and DLC issues came to light, Mass Effect 3 saw a lot of cancelled pre-orders and there’s no shortage of PC gamers prepared to wait it out or even forgo the finale altogether. Unfortunately, too many people either didn’t have the willpower to go without or just didn’t understand why being forced to install an unstable beta product that breaks down firewalls in order to mine your computer for personal information which its developer then sells to third party advertisers was a bad thing. So what loss in sales there has been, EA will inevitable blame on piracy and/or the PCs lack of viability as a gaming platform.
With that in mind there is a part of me that feels that I might as well go the illegal download route but I don’t want to do anything that would give EA an excuse to pretend their policies have been vindicated.
I want to play Mass Effect 3. I want EA to lose out when I do. But I don’t want to help justify EA treating their PC customers any worse than they already do.
It’s a conundrum.
Console gamers can (for now at least) stick it to EA through the used game market and indeed one legal plan for Mass Effect is to opportunistically purchase used copies of all three instalments for the Xbox when I can, on the assumption that one day I’ll own an Xbox on which to play them.
Of course if ME3 is eventually released on Steam we’ll be left wondering if that wasn’t part of EA’s master plan all along: withhold the spyware free version for as long possible and release it when we’re desperate enough to pay an exorbitant amount for it.
And the saddest part? Just watch this (the relevant part starts at 5:20). And try not to cry.
