More bad math for kids …
Piracy is a problems for video game makers, and always had been. I recall having to skim through my PGA Tour Golf for Mac manual to find a certain detail – every time I started the program. That was 17 years ago. Now we have Starforce and rootkits and other elements to supplement manual authentication. Yet there are claims that piracy is worse than ever – every platform loses sales due to ‘hacks’ and downloads. There are those whose business it is to estimate the losses incurred by piracy. One of them has chimed in this week with regard to the top-selling Nintendo DS. Can you guess his estimate of what percentage of North American DS users are playing pirated games? Answer to yourself before you click in …
So … what was your tally? 10%? 20%? Not even close! 90% according to John Hiller of the British ELSPA. That is right – he says that “it’s thought 90 per cent of Nintendo DS users are playing pirated games because of R4s. Takings from Nintendo DS games in the US are lower than any other console.” The R4 he refers to isn’t the astromech that accompanies Obi-Wan to Geonosis, but rather a interface card that is the same size as a DS game card. Inside there is a slot for a micro-SD card, which allows you to install games downloaded illegally from the internet. Of course, it also allows the use of ‘homebrew’ – custom made applications.
OK, so now we get to the core message – piracy is bad, the R4 is primarily used as a piracy-enable, and John Hiller doesn’t want folks in the UK pirating software. That all makes sense – but 90%? Where the heck does THAT number come from? How many people do you know who personally own a Nintendo DS? I know a few dozen or so – the vast majority of whom are kids, and not a single one has a flash-cart of any type. Indeed, it was only a week or so ago that I heard the term R4 in a discussion on the GamerDad forums.
I have always been an advocate against piracy – I have made enemies on PSP forums by suggesting from the very start that the amount of non-piracy (i.e. legit ‘homebrew’) usage of ‘custom firmware’ (i.e. hacking the firmware) is so small that it could easily be considered rounding error. But despite the incredible ease of hacking the PSP and getting pirated games for the system, I wouldn’t estimate the piracy rate for that system anywhere *near* 90%.
So what good does citing a number that is absurd on its’ face? Perhaps the question should be more about the HARM it does! Because reading that makes me categorize him as a clueless alarmist with an agenda – and file him alongside the RIAA and others who insinuate that we could pay off the national debt in three months if people just stopped downloading music and movies.
I don’t want my kids pirating, nor do I want them playing pirated games with their friends – but I want them to do it because pirating commercial software is wrong, not because people like Hiller have used scare tactics to force legislation that push draconian measures to counter the perception they have built that things like this are “risking the future of the games industry”.
Let me push my own made-up statistic – 100% of people with a clue think John Hiller is full of crap.
February 1st, 2008 at 12:41 am
Oh wow, nice timing, because I’ve been turning over a piracy post in my mind. I’ll be saying the same thing – discourage piracy in your family – but coming at it from a different angle.
This ELSPA thing is interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the British media and agencies tend to be more alarmist. They love stories like this – there were articles about the R4 going around before Christmas, no doubt driving sales even higher. Secondly, I do actually think piracy is more prevalent in Britain. The British contigent on any file-sharing platform is always very strong, and it seems to be the only country that regularly produces stories about some guy selling pirated software at the local market or “car boot sale” and making a lot of money before being raided.
February 8th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
I wrestle with this myself, because I grew up pirating — I wasn’t *poor*, but I was just a kid in the suburbs, too young to get a job and with limited means of earning money elsewhere. And downloading a copy of something I literally had no money to pay for wasn’t exactly losing anybody any money, as it went in my head. Still, whenever I *did* have money, I spent it on games. I figured that was a pretty good compromise. Now, I have a real job, and make real money, but it’s hard to break old habits. I still buy games I really like, but I do have an R4 like the article talks about, and I don’t pay for every single DS game I enjoy enough to play for more than 5 minutes. The ability to “demo” any game, any time, is really nice, but sometimes I’m tempted to abuse it.
Now that I have a kid of my own, it won’t be long before I have to either explain what I do and try to justify it, or go “cold turkey” and only use legitimate software. It’s a bit of a pickle =-)