Current Events > Should piracy be tolerated by video game companies?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Well?
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Only if the games are 2 gens old.

GC/PS2 and before would be acceptable under these rules.

If it's not their products being pirated they should just leave it the fuck alone.
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It's a sign that they are missing out on a market that wants to play these older games. They're being foolish by not offering a legal solution to access the games.

Of course Nintendo themselves are caught selling a game via VC that was an identical rom found on one of these sites.
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It's the only way people can play certain games.
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Only if they aren't readily offering their own easily accessible version.
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look at how itunes, spotify, etc. mostly gained popularity over pirating music. how? make it convenient and easy to get what you want and people are willing to pay for it.

companies are missing it out on tons of money by not having their classic games available and less people would pirate.
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If the company makes no effort to make their old products accessible or available then I'd say piracy is perfectly justifiable

Most of the N64 or NGC library, for instance, is unavailable right now since Nintendo doesn't make the games available for sale through their online store, and the consoles/games aren't sold physically in store anymore.
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Doom_Art posted...

If the company makes no effort to make their old products accessible or available then I'd say piracy is perfectly justifiable

Most of the N64 or NGC library, for instance, is unavailable right now since Nintendo doesn't make the games available for sale through their online store, and the consoles/games aren't sold physically in store anymore.

This

And I also don't agree with them using measures that inconvenience buyers more than pirates (most DRM)
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GOG was a great idea. Give people an avenue to pay the original makers of games and make it DRM-free. It's not very hard to see how it got so popular.
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Nintendo should not only be supportive of fans downloading their entire library of games for free, but also encourage it by making the eshop free.
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Wasn't there some study a while back that said that piracy would actually boost sales and revenue and interest in games? I forget how, probably by encouraging people to play older titles, which would incite interest in future ones/new entries that weren't able to be emulated or something?

If that's true, seems like it's in the companies' best interests to look the other way with this stuff. At least financially.

From an artistic perspective I can see why someone would not like others effectively stealing their work though.
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Personally, if I were selling a game, I wouldn't really care about small-scale stuff - things like someone downloading the game illegally to play, or making a copy for a friend, or using account sharing to let a few people play a single copy.

Heck, if I found someone distributing pirated copies on a website or whatever, I'd probably just be like "Hey, not gonna make a big deal out of it, but can you add a "If you like the game please support the dev and buy it" notice or something?". The only time I'd actually take action is if someone was directly making money off piracy of it. (By "directly", I mean not just eg. "they've got ads on a site they let people download it for free from", but that they're actually selling it itself or including it as part of a pay-to-access pirated collection, etc.)
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It's something that is going to happen regardless, so they should do the bare minimum to protect their copyright and move on. It's one of those things where if you try to abolish it, it just comes back stronger. Any company that tries to correlate it to lost sales is delusional. It's illegal for sure, but mostly a victimless crime.