Sunday, March 6, 2011

Gaming Piracy, Killing The Experience...

I was reading a couple of threads over at the GBATemp 3DS boards and saw how everyone was worried that pirating the 3DS would lead to killing the machine over time. Perhaps developers would stop developing games or maybe the quality wouldn't be as great as it could be. This may be true, but for me, piracy does more than damage sales for Nintendo. I've realized that piracy damages the whole gaming experience.

I grew up with the Sega Genesis, I can still remember my mom purchasing the system and the included Sonic 1 (and mail in certificate for Sonic 2) that came with the system. I can also remember wanting so many of the new games for the Genesis like, Sonic 3/Knuckles, Aladdin, Jurassic Park, Rocket Knight Adventures, etc... In order to get these though I had to mow lawns or do chores around the house and save my money for them! The other option was to wait throughout the year for my birthday or Christmas. Anyway what I'm getting to is, I appreciated these games because I had to work for them. To this day my favorite game is still Sonic 1. In this age of the Internet we expect things instantly, and most of us here can usually succeed at obtaining this. As a child I could only dream of having every game for every system. I guess the thought of all the work and money I would have to put in to obtain every game just seemed unimaginable. Now that we have the internet, the whole EUR, USA & JAP collections for many recent generation systems can be had in a matter of hours (or minutes). You can no longer admire that game case, artwork and physical media sitting on your shelf that you worked so hard for. Our games sit on a memory card waiting to be played, which most of the time doesn't happen because the care to play just isn't there like it is when you review a game, anticipate a game, rent the game and buy the game.

So don't be so worried about the system dying, be more concerned with the experience you lose when downloading a game. Anyone out there agree with me?