| My thoughts For starters, PC gaming is not dying. Pundits have been saying it's dying for about a decade now. It has changed a lot and has become much more mainstream but there are still a lot of good games being developed. One just has to know where to look to find quality games. Quit buying what the advertisements and hype tell you to buy and do some homework. That leads me to my next point.
I really don't think bootlegging is all that bad. Sometimes bootlegging can do the industry a lot of good. More than a few games out there don't have demos or the demos are so limited and crippled that you cannot get a feel for the game. How many times have you bought a game, even one you played the demo and got burned? How many are fun for about an hour (conveniently the length of a demo) and then you realize how much the game sucks because it never changes? It's the same with music, back in the day you would hear a few songs from a favorite band's new album and buy it. Come to find out the good songs were played on the radio and the rest is filler. That, more than anything I think led to the rise of piracy.
I can name at least six games and three companies that have made money off of me through bootlegging. I tried their full games, came to like them and bought the software to support the developers. Coincidentally these are smaller shops with their own digital distribution system (either their own or through steam). A lot of other games don't make the cut and guess what? They get deleted off my hard drive. I think we should all get out of the mentality that people pirate only what they would pay for if they couldn't download it.
Ultimately I think that the anti-piracy efforts is a fear response. Finally the consumer has power to make better informed decisions (instead of being told via advertisements and sponsored reviews) to support or not support a digital product. And this makes the big boys worried. Their tired tactic of forcing you to buy 10% quality, 90% garbage/filler at 100% of the price is dying and they know it. This is why they are trying to use propaganda and the government to try and roll back the clock. I think it's too late. |
