And now a long disclaimer.
It's not that I care so much about piracy. If you're going to do it, then do it. I've done it a couple of times myself, so I'm not here to pass judgement. I'm not even going to say it's "wrong" (morally or otherwise). I'll leave that in the hands of the justice system or whichever supernatural being you like. The fact that a law exists doesn't necessarily mean you're a bad person for not following it. You might be a terrible person anyway, but if you die tomorrow and end up in your preferred version of Hell for all eternity, it's probably not because you failed to obey the speed limit, and it's probably not because you downloaded a video game without paying for it.
Some will tell you that software piracy is essentially theft and that it harms the video game developers and the industry as a whole, but it's pretty obvious that such claims are still up for debate. Since I don't have any hard evidence that software piracy has ever caused a video game developer to go hungry, I won't tell you what to do. Make your own decision and live with it.
What I don't like are the attempts to justify piracy and the claims that it helps the industry in some counter-intuitive way. Let's get something straight: People download games illegally because they don't want to pay for them. It's that simple. They can take a game for free instead of paying, so they do it. Surely there are those who engage in piracy for the sake of trying a game before they decide to buy it, but I have serious doubts that these conscientious pirates are the majority. There are others who use piracy as a way of boycotting a publisher or developer, but if you want to commit to a boycott, you should have the self-control to go without the product of the company you're boycotting. In any case, for many if not the vast majority, piracy is nothing more than an attempt to get something for nothing.
This is why it's so transparently pathetic when pirates try to justify what they do. The fact that they even feel the need to justify piracy at all is kind of troubling. If you're comfortable with your own choices and your personal reasons for those choices, you shouldn't need to explain them in detail to everyone. But instead of owning up to the fact that they're violating copyright law for personal gain, accepting that decision for what it is, and ignoring the haters, they desperately try to come up with reasons that piracy is either harmless or somehow beneficial to all parties involved. (Are they trying to convince me, or are they trying to convince themselves?) I'll admit that some of their arguments are plausible, even when the claims on which they base these arguments are completely unverifiable, but let's be honest. It's denial, plain and simple.
One of the most popular (and perhaps most bone-headed) justifications of piracy goes something like this: "But it's not stealing!" Since theft usually means taking something from someone else, while software piracy typically involves making a copy while leaving the original intact instead of taking it away, many argue that piracy is not the same as theft. Based on that definition of theft, this is absolutely true. After all, there's a reason we use a different word. But is everything that isn't "theft" automatically justified?
It's fine to point out that piracy isn't stealing if you're actually responding to claims that piracy and theft are one in the same, but I've had people tell me repeatedly that "it's not stealing" even when the concept of stealing hadn't been brought up in the discussion at all. It's as if people believe that "it's not stealing" is the end-all argument in favor of doing whatever you want regardless of context. Frankly, I don't care that piracy isn't theft. Does it really matter? If piracy is wrong, then quibbling over semantics doesn't make it less wrong. If piracy isn't wrong, then comparing it to a serious crime isn't helping your case.
I'd also like to point out that it doesn't matter whether the publisher loses a copy. In the age of digital distribution, the idea of counting copies of a product is meaningless. (In fact, the entire concept of theft, in the traditional sense, is equally meaningless in this context.) What the publisher loses due to piracy, in theory, is a potential sale.
This leads to the obvious "but I wasn't going to buy it anyway." The implication is that no potential sale is lost because the pirate never would have spent any money on the product even if piracy weren't an option. Fair enough, if it's true, but I suspect it rarely is. People who illegally download games want to play games, and I see no reason to assume that the average pirate wants to play games any less than the average customer. The only obvious difference is that the pirate isn't afraid to break the rules. The fact that someone downloads a game illegally to save money is no indication that this person would never spend money on games.
But since we'll never have reliable data on the percentage of pirates who would have been paying customers if piracy weren't an option, we can only guess about piracy's overall effect on sales. I have no doubt that a significant number of pirates would buy games if they had to, but there are other factors to consider.
Some would argue that piracy actually helps sales by giving more exposure to certain games. This isn't entirely unreasonable, but there's no real evidence for it. Accepting this viewpoint requires us to assume either that each pirate, on average, perhaps through word-of-mouth, effectively convinces more than one other person to buy the game, or that there are a whole lot of those conscientious pirates who illegally download a game to try it out and then buy a legitimate copy if they like it. I think either scenario is unlikely.
Those few who do adhere to the "try it before you buy it" philosophy, though, are okay in my book. I can't complain. If the owners of a game don't want people to pirate the full version of their game to use it as a demo, they should release a free demo. In fact, there's no excuse for not releasing a demo. Either the developers are lazy (which probably means the game is bad), or they're afraid that letting people play the game before they buy it will lead to a decrease in sales (which almost surely means the game is bad). Unfortunately, you don't need to make a good game to get rich. The video game industry is like any other business. The publishers don't want you to make an informed decision; they just want you to buy. That's why they try so hard to get us to pre-order their games even before a single review has been written.
But piracy isn't some form of vigilante justice. Those who use their general dissatisfaction with the state of the industry to justify piracy seem to have this odd delusion that they're affecting things in a positive way. They claim they'll buy the games made by the developers who allegedly deserve their money and pirate everything else. The idea is to avoid rewarding bad behavior, which sounds nice. But pirating a game because it was made by a developer you hate isn't sending the right message. If they know people are pirating their game, it tells them two things. The first is that people want their game. The second is that they need to crack down on piracy so these people who want their game are forced to pay.
Even if piracy does have some positive net effect, it's still ridiculous to pretend that people engage in piracy for this reason. Piracy isn't about being a hero. It's about each individual doing what's best for himself, and any theoretical benefits are nothing more than an unintended side-effect which proves useful for desperate after-the-fact rationalization.
