Piracy Isn't Hurting Any Companies!

At least, that's what 45% of the GameFAQs community believes.


Recently, their daily poll featured this question: "Do you believe piracy is a real problem for the video game industry?" Over 31,000 responders feel that piracy is OK because "they're still making billions". Another 6,000 feel that stealing games somehow makes the victim-company more money than if their product wasn't stolen. I can't say that I'm surprised, given the human capacity for rationalizing something that we want to believe.

Smaller developers can suffer and even go under if their games are pirated. Furthermore, even if the bigger companies won't be hurt too bad by piracy, rampant theft of their product only encourages them to come up with increasingly more draconian DRM measures... this ultimately hurts legitimate customers. That's right, piracy doesn't only hurt the developers and the publishers... it hurts your fellow gamers.

Sure, we can bitch and moan and say that the big companies shouldn't treat their legitimate customers like the enemy, (and I will no longer buy from certain companies precisely because of such an attitude,) but at the same time I don't think its entirely fair to get mad at a company that's just trying to protect its product from being stolen. The responsibility rests with those who steal.


The poll results can be seen here.