PixlBit

Hmmm. It's an interesting topic. I used to emulate some handheld games every now and then but I started feeling a bit guilty there is a sort of feeling to playing a game on a handheld that a PC can't really emulate (lol puns). I stopped doing that eventually and I deleted all of files emulated files because of that. I think emulating is okay only if the game isn't readily available like Earthbound up until recently. I am of the support the developer mentality and I firmly believe that unles there are sales, developers won't make new games, so we should support them as much as possible. Basically, emulation/pirating = no money, no money = no developers, no developers = no games.

Ok, here's my stance on emulation: If the game isn't currently making the dev's and publishers money, go nuts. Want a copy of pokemon red? Go nuts. However, somthing like Ocarina of Time is still making money for nintendo, so it's a bit more of a grey area. 

I'm perfectly fine with pirating anything that's rare and elusive. For example, I have no problem with pirating Suikoden 2 since people want $120 for a used copy, but I wouldn't be ok with pirating a copy of Final Fantasy 7 since there are so many copies floating around at a decent price.

These are both older games that I used in my example, but I think you get my point.

That's similar to how I feel. If the only place I could find something is in an obscure bargain bin where the money would not go to the creators anyway, then screw it. However, if I can support someone by buying a product, I will if I can. Meaning I'll either buy it or go without. 

Yeah I kind of agree with both of you.

My saying goes like this: If it's out of print; pirate the shit!   

Yep :)

Well I see it like this... If you have a Multi-Billion dollar company that has its' product pirated since it began and still made over a Billion dollars then how much does it hurt?

The problem is that if everyone adopts this attitude, then the company makes nothing. And then you are cheating out other people who actually spent money on the product. But hey, no judgement here man. I kinda do it sometimes.

From what I remember, I played games of questionable legality because I had very limited means of acquiring them.  I have since purchased nearly all of them because I loved them.  Looking back, I am not very proud of myself, which is probably why I purchased them when I had the funds.

 Yeah. I'm a college student and it's always extremely tempting to pirate shit. I pirated one game recently and that's because I had to review it that week and I didn't have the money. I bought it afterwards though. I think Steam Sales almost make piracy redundant though.

I claim ignorance.  I was emulating SNES games on my computer in grade school.  I did not realize that it was illegal until I was older.

so wait, you actually did lose your games?

Yeah, almost all of the games I owned physical copies of.

If I were in a similar situation, I might feel somewhat justified.  Since I am not, I still could not do it myself.  Sorry to hear that though.

I don't pirate but fundamentally, I think if you have ever owned the game, piracy is no big deal. However, something about pirating every new release kinda rubs me the wrong way

Yeah, no I kind of agree exactly.

I think the only time it is acceptable is in the case of emulating games that are on formats that are no longer supported or games that may have only been available in Japan. Before the Launch of the Wii, Nintendo made out like the intire NES,SNES, and N64 liabraries were going to be available to purchase and download. 6 years later and there are tons of games still not added. Admittedly not all of those game were good or worth the effort but there are a lot of classic that are not avaialbe. So they are creating a situation that makes piracy very appealing.

 I don't know so much that it's acceptable, but it is understandable. At the end of the day you are still taking something for nothing. But eh, I honestly don't care unless you just go around pirating every new game that comes out.

The thing is when I think of piracy of software, I think of people manking illegal copies and selling them. For the most part as for emulators and the games they offer most of what I have come across has been free.Its hardcore fans looking to keep the flame alive on a game they think everyone should get the chance to play.

Honestly, I don’t think it’s ever “acceptable,” but some cases are more understandable than others.  No matter what the excuse is, it is still wrong.  So what if it’s out of print, they might still choose to release it one day.  That’s their right.  You don’t have a right to play it just because it exists.

But that’s my thoughts and feelings on the subject at an academic level.  I really don’t judge someone for doing it, unless they feel entitled to every new game out there for free.  I understand why someone might do it and not feel guilty when the alternative is paying $100 for the only copy they can find on ebay.  Hell, when I first discovered emulators in the late 90s (or maybe early 00s, can’t really remember) I downloaded tons of games.

And on a kind of side topic, I do get really annoyed when people act like pirating is the exact same as stealing a physical object.  It’s not.  As I stated, I do think piracy is wrong, but to act like it’s a 1-to-1 loss of sales is idiotic.  (But at to act like it doesn’t affect sales at all is equally idiotic.)  

Can't really disagree with any of that. I actually deleted my .exe files of the Sonic trilogy when I learned they were being legitimately sold on Steam for a not-awful price. But then I never ended up buying them, I just erased the emulations from my hard drive cause my "bargain bin doesn't help the creators" excuse was invalidated, so they honestly did not lose money either way.

 Ok. Every game in Australia costs 100 bucks. EVERY GAME! There is a lot of piracy here. With that said, the only times I really Pirate is if the game doesn't have a demo and I want to test the waters before paying for it, or if I already owned the game, but it got damaged or something like that. What are your thoughts on those scenarios?

If no retailers selling it, I don't see anything wrong with pirating an older game. They already showed they don't want your money, so might as well find another way to play the game.

Exactly!

Only if it's an old, out of print game or if I'm just testing out a PC game on my machine, where a demo isn't available, as my laptop is very tempermental and picky where it chooses what to run!

 Yeah I do that. If a game doesn't have a demo, I pirate it to see whether it's worth dropping 100 bucks on. Because Australian pricing on games is fucking ridiculous.

No.

 Ok, so recently my house burnt down, and all of the pc games I used to own physical copies of I pirated. I already owned those games. I didn't sell them or anything. Is what I did wrong? I don't think so.

Do you also get to go to a furniture store and walk out with replacements because yours went up in flames? No.

No because insurance covers that. It doesn't cover games. If I've already given my money and shown support to the developers, then what does it matter? All I'm doing is replacing items I've lost.

There's that little thing about it being illegal, for one. But you're also using an edge case. Even if a game is out of print, there are people selling legitimate copies of it. As a retailer of video games for almost a decade, piracy has been one of my biggest pet peeves. People can dress it up any way they want to, but at the end of the day the prevailing sentiment is "I can pirate this because I deserve to."

I've never pirated a game. If it's something that is impossible to come by or super expensive (see Earthbound) I simply do without. There are plenty of games out there.

That's fine. People who feel entitled to every game for free annoy me. However, I'm talking about MY case here in this discussion. It may be an edge case, but I still feel justified in doing what I did. It may be illegal, but so is pissing on a tree technically. If I've already bought the damn game, and I had a house fire and was unable to get them back, especially the rarer games, you're damn right I'm going to buy them. I am entitled to them because I bought them. If I was buying them for another console, yeah, that's a bit shit. As a college student who doesn't have much money, why the fuck should I spend another 100 bucks on a game that I've already spent money on? That is just retarded.

I'm sorry to hear that you had such a situation. We'll have to agree to disagree on this though. I'm a collector with hundreds of games, but if they all went up in flames or got stolen tomorrow I'd just count them as a loss and move on. I'd probably rebuy some of the most important games, like my MGS and Final Fantasy titles, but I don't think I automatically get a pass to download all of my lost games if the worst happens.

Of course, I forget that you're in Australia. I do believe that the pricing for games in your neck of the woods is downright criminal, so if I had grown up there maybe I'd feel differently.

Yeah I guess we'll have to. I look at the law in terms of practicality. Here we have a law that states that if a driver is on a certain stage of his license, he/she cannot have passengers after 11 pm. However, if your friend is at the pub, has ran out of money and the only person who can give them a lift is someone on that stage of their license, you're damn right I would.

 I see it as this. If you buy a physical copy of a game, you own it. If you buy a digital copy, you own the license to it. If you lose the digital copy, it's ok, you can download it again for free, because steam, origin, xbox live etc. keep a record of your transaction. With a physical copy though, you don't have that. I think though that you should be entitled to reimbursement of lost property though. Just because pirating is illegal and is almost entirely used for the wrong reasons does not mean that every application of it is wrong. However, if you disagree, that's fine. Just arguing a little further lol.

For your house fire scenario, you should be able to get money to replace all of your belongings if you have adequate insurance. At least as good of a payout as you would get for furniture or jewelry. Insurance companies aren't going to declare video games silly and therefore worth zero dollars. If you have no insurance then your bad luck has screwed you in things much worse than losing your games and those particular items shouldn't be treated as special and validate their theft.

I lost a bunch of Atari games in a flood years ago and just decided I'd live without them.

My whole collection was stolen about 7 years ago, and my insurance company worked with a distributor to replace the titles still in print. There's the problem for a collector, though: still in print. Nothing from the previous generation was replaced. I got cash for the replacement value of the older titles, but it was a one-size-fits-all formula (i.e., I got the same amount for Tomb Raider II and Suikoden II).

Long story short, with insurance, you'll be at least partially covered. Then you've just got to determine your priorities from there.

Yeah, but that's not any different from anything else in your house. Your heirloom kitchen knives and your first edition novels will all be treated the same and just because it's easier to steal a game or movie digitally doesn't make those items freebies.

Oh, agreed. My comment wasn't intended to weigh in on the piracy debate but rather to add more information about how insurance covers games.

Well, we're agreed then. Hooray!

Ok, we had home and content insurance worth $70,000. The stuff we lost was worth around $100,000. That was our oversight. That meant I sacrificed my gaming collection to buy another guitar. Hell, I don't even own a console anymore. Or have a bedroom at home. But eh.

  I didn't pirate every game. Just a few that I couldn't live without. I'm sorry if in your eyes that makes me a bad person, but frankly I don't give a shit. I am not paying another $100 for games I have already paid $100 for.

I've pretty much removed you from the situation in my mind and am only thinking in generalities. I don't think you're a bad person. Everyone does stuff I think is wrong, especially me.

Bahahaha yeah. Same boat here. I think the Nazi's were wrong, but I still plan on opening up a resturaunt that serves deep fried Jews.

Well, i'm going to do a revelation here: My Xbox and my Wii (used to be) are pirate. But before explaining, here's some context. 

In Colombia, due to exportation prices and the such, when everything more than 60 dollars is passed to pesos (our currency) it becomes expensive as hell, and every game suffers that. Almost every gamer in Colombia has their consoles pirated so they can play games they sell on stock discs or have ROMs, emulators or the pirated games on the PC. Despite that, I sort of see it justified, as not every one is a rich and not many people have advantages.

Now yeah, my Xbox was bought pirated and it even included emulators inside, but after some years, I sometimes asked my dad to bought me some "original" games (by Amazon), but even I still continued to buy pirated games. My Wii was also bought pirated, but I wanted that to be original, but I didn't complain much as I got to play many games, and I still bought from time to time "original" games. It was only till I updated my Wii to play Metroid Prime Trilogy that it made useless the method (I think it was a chip) that the Wii got pirated because it was probably very outdated. After that, I started to get my games from time to time using Amazon, which is still the method I use to this day.

Though I do want to support the companies, by buying the "original" copies and getting the official rereleased, I can see pirating as an option if you're short of money, and like some of the guys said here, to get games that are rare, haven't been rereleased and/or are exclusive to Japan or any other country. Besides, if it wasn't for emulation I wouldn't had discovered some awesome games. Just make sure you also get the official games and also learn how to pass pesos to dollars if you want cheaper games.

 That sucks man. In Australia games cost 100 bucks rather than 60, so a LOT of people here pirate because they think it's abhorent. How much does moving to pesos raise the currency?

 I kind of understand that. This is a judgement free zone. I've pirated in the past, I think everyone has. If a game doesn't have a demo I'll pirate it to try it before I drop 100 bucks on it. But yeah, I honestly don't have a problem with what you're doing.

 As for the emulation thing... I wish older games were available on more consoles. I mean if nintendo released their old games on pc there'd be less emulation. However, we jst can't play a lot of those games anymore because they don't make consoles that run them anymore, and that is quite a shame.

I think companies need to make some of these elusive and expensive games available for people to play. We FINALLY got Earthbound. More companies need to follow suit. Sega started this with NiGHTS: Into Dreams and Guardian Heroes. They should do the same with Burning Rangers. I want to play this so bad on the original hardware. I can't afford the going prices on Ebay. Its SOOOO tempting to get a burned copy just to play it.

 Damn straight! I've emulated so many games that I just wouldn't have access to!

Big companies often screw over the consumer (Capcom anyone!!) so to be honest I don't loose much sleep over it but I don't really pirate games. I don't have beef with wnyone that does though, infact I think that it's going to happen regardless of measure taken because like pretty much everything in life it's cause and effect. I don't buy the argument from some that pirating will eventually lead to a collapse in some way, and I don't like the reverse opinion that everything should be ok to get for free, other wise there would be ni industry. Most folk who pirate only download some titles, genuine gamers usually like to collect their discs, box sets and the like and this seems to create a pretty effective balance in my opinion. It's hackers that really piss me off!

 Yeah. This is where offering awesome stuff with pre-orders comes in handy. I bought the special edition of dark souls, got a mousepad, Art books, posters, and a cool little figurine thing. If companies offer me posters, I'll spend extra.