Video game piracy is simply unauthorized of audiovisual works which are covered by the copyright laws in a way that violates the rights of the copyright owner and violates his intellectual rights, in most cases leading to financial gain to the person pirating and substantial financial losses to the copyright owner. since the advent of commercialized video gaming, video game piracy has been an emotive issue with the big video game companies reporting losses running to colossal sums of money.
For instance, in 2010, the Business software alliance of the United States asserted that the general software piracy losses in the entire world were $51 Billion with the bulk of the losses emanating from video gaming piracy.
It is, however, worth noting that with the advent of technology and increased encryption and security features, the losses in gaming income as a result of piracy has drastically reduced and is currently negligible compared to the income generated by the commercial players in the gaming industry.
The history of the video game piracy could be traced back in three main parts namely the cassette tapes of the early and mid-1980s, the dedicated console of mid and late 80s and the rise of CDs in the 1990s (Depoorter, 2014).
Cassette tape period.
Depoorter (2014) asserts that the gaming industry suffered immense losses at the beginning of commercialized video gaming when video gaming was offered on cassette tapes. This is due to the fact that the cassettes had little or no security features and were easy target for unscrupulous and corrupt businessmen who would only buy one original cassette tape and duplicate the rest thus denying the video game company substantial income.
Though the counterfeit copies did not have clear features as the original, the pirated copies were selling at cheaper rates and most of the time the video gaming companies could not recoup their profits and ended up closing their businesses.
The security features were in a simply coded language which could be accessed or encoded by an average computer savvy individual even after the video gaming companies started requiring access codes as an added security feature.
The cassette tape period is regarded as a period whereby the developers of video games suffered supernormal losses since the cassette could be easily duplicated by the growing numbers of video gamers who were not ready to spend big in purchasing original tapes. This is the period which is regarded as the arms race period between pirates and developers.
The Emergence of the Dedicated Console.
To militate against the loss of income as a result of pirated video game cassettes, the gaming industry developed the game specialized consoles which ensured families could play their favorite video games without using the personal computer as is the case with cassette tapes. The advent of specialized consoles ensured games could also be stored in hard plastic cases that were much harder to copy data from thus serving as a safety precaution and deterrent to fraudsters and individuals who could be pirating the video game tapes. Again most specialized consoles came with a built-in ROM (Random Access Memory) which could detect if and when a video game was pirated (Hill, 2007).
The gaming industry during this time also suffered losses with the pirating community devising ways of reverse engineering the consoles and creating their own replication of consoles which could run both legitimate and pirated copies. According to Hill (2007),companies such as Nintendo tried filing lawsuits against the individuals pirating their video games but since they were already making supernormal profits, they most of the time disregarded the imitators since the pirating did not have a substantial impact on their sales and profit margins.
The rise of CDs.
Due to increased demand by the programmers in the video industry for more storage space, the floppies and consoles were replaced by CDs. At first, CDs were easier to copy and duplicate but with time the programmers came up with security features which made the CDs harder to crack and/or pirate.
Still, it goes without saying that today’s average consumer of video games is not that tech savvy and therefore the problem of widespread pirating of CDs is not a common phenomenon as was the case with floppies and the consoles. The technical know-how of cracking CDs and using pirated computer games is beyond the grasp of the regular end user of video games.
It is however quite evident that the majority of video game pirating in the modern world is happening in personal computers and mobile gadgets like cell phones due to a large number of technologically savvy individuals who are quite conversant with hacking methods.
The hosting of computer gaming in hard to crack cloud computing software and has ensured that the losses of video gaming profits through pirating is quite negligible. Also, most countries have come up with the anti-piracy legal framework and punitive laws which makes the pirating occupation quite unimpressive.
What the Future Holds For Pirating Practice.
As earlier indicated at the start of this paper, illegal duplication of copyrighted audiovisual material is what is regarded as piracy and the history of the video gaming piracy as illustrated above indicates that companies have become more innovative by ensuring they come up with methods to curb against video pirating through embracing innovative technological breakthroughs.
Companies have realized that indulging in lawsuits is in most cases counterproductive and it is now common practice for companies to ensure they come up with stringent security features in their video gaming to discourage illegal infringement and accessibility by unauthorized persons.
For instance, the Microsoft Company has imposed restrictions to end users who pirate the XBOX and their Play station products. These restrictions include suspension of individuals caught pirating from accessing the Microsoft company gaming in the future (Depoorter, 2014).
It is also worth noting that illegally downloading video games, music and movies is a federal crime in the United States with punishment for convicted persons ranging from paying back the video game companies or imprisonment. Fines could even go up to $ 150,000 in fines. According to the motion picture association of America (MPAA), well over 1.8 million copies of pirated copies of movies were seized in the United States.
When game companies goes too far.
Although it is a correct idea to fight against pirated games, some companies have taken some extreme measures to fight against piracy, which has led to the notoriety of legitimate game companies.
This encryption and anti-piracy cracking technology is called “StarForce.” “StarForce” was born in 1998. Its key method to encrypt games is by measuring the physical angle between the first and last write sectors in a CD. To achieve this goal, “StarForce” will obtain the highest permission of the computer system without the user’s permission. After that, unless the hard disk is formatted, the changes to the system settings will not be undone even if “StarForce” is uninstalled. It also continuously monitors the user’s computer and collects all the data. If there is an error in the operation of “StarForce,” the software will send the complete information of the computer data back to the company, which contains more than 3,700 lines of personal data. After that, it will erase all the related files and often caused the system crash.
Although StarForce is a security anti-cracking technology, its security properties have been increasingly questioned. Several companies eventually abandoned it for its “rogue” anti-piracy methods.Fortunately, in this period, some game developers made some interesting approach instead of boring encryption. For example, in “Serious Sam 3” if the game detects players is running a cracked version of the game, the game will create an invincible scorpion. This scorpion has super speed damage and a special persistence, and it will follow players all the time to the ends of the earth.
Until now, developers have preferred this approach to trick pirated game players in their game. The purpose is to let the pirated games players cannot complete the game. One of the most famous games for that is the “Game Dev Tycoon.”
The game is priced at $7.99. However, the developers published an “official cracked version.” and it is free. In this game, players need to run a video games studio, manage the developing team and cash flow to develop games and earn revenue. The pirated version, however, has an Easter egg hidden in it. Everything is fine in the beginning, and the players’ video games company is going to get bigger and bigger. But in the mid to late stages, an in-game event is triggered, and a notification is received:
“Boss, it seems that while many players play our new game., they steal it by downloading a cracked version rather than buying it legally. If players don’t buy the games they like, we will sooner or later go bankrupt.” Then the players’ company will be bankrupted soon.
In conclusion.
The movie industry is very lucrative and the impact of video game pirating has not adversely affected the players in the market.it is therefore imperative that most video game companies have opted to invest in innovative technology to mitigate against loss of income through pirating instead of indulging in endless court battles with the unscrupulous individuals who pirate their products. The investment has seemingly paid dividends since a credible study by the European Union in September 2017 showed that piracy did not have any impact on sales and in the cases of video games it eventually ended up helping the soaring of sales.
References.
Depoorter, B. (2014). What happened to video game piracy?. Communications of the ACM, 57(5), 33–34.
Hill, C. W. (2007). Digital piracy: Causes, consequences, and strategic responses. Asia Pacific Journal of Management, 24(1), 9–25.
