Olympics Piracy and Lousy Sales
Gaming experience has never been better… and cheaper. Sometimes it’s even free.
Well that is unless you download off an internet site, or buy one of those pirated CDs, which can easily get you a ticket for some jail time (thus using up some of your valuable gaming time). Nowadays, everyone seems to be doing it, be it intentionally or not, from individuals (like your ‘friend who ‘tried’ out this pirated version of a video game just to see if it is worth buying) to billionaire organizations (like the organizers of the Olympics).
An estimated $300 billion is said to be lost by the original proprietors because of these pirates. If you are thinking “lousy China, pirating all those CDs”, well think again buddy. Sure most of the biggest (and nastiest?) gang leaders of these pirating syndicates can be identified as Chinese, but not all of the pirates are from China. If this were 3 to 5 years back, you might have hit the spot, but not anymore. All over the world, individuals are doing pirating too. Actually, even copying your original game for a friend is considered a crime, even if it is just for sharing it or wanting him or her to try out your new game. It is estimated that the ordinary gamer Joe (or Jane), is estimated to have experienced pirating off a game once, which is of course, most probably not true. It is true to most hardcore gamers, that one way or the other; they will absolutely avoid pirating or avoid using pirated games (and if you are a hardcore gamer dreaming of a cool and happy future in the gaming industry, and you patronage counterfeit games, you are contributing to the hundreds of thousands of job loss rampant in gaming companies, in The US alone).
But since the games production and distribution business is part of the creative industry, piracy cannot be helped (who said that those French fashion designers are the only ones with piracy problems). In fact game piracy is much more easier to accomplish because since people are dealing with software, not only are pirated copies available in the street, but are also available for easy downloads through torrent sites and the likes.
A pirating incident is almost unavoidable nowadays that even the world acclaimed Olympics website was recently seriously accused of pirating Cadin Batrack’s game and posting it on their official (gasp!) website. Although the game of Batrack was not carbon copied (meaning it was very much ripped off, even down to the game’s name), there were startling similarities with Batrack’s and the Olympics’ games that there were potentially serious lawsuits against the latter, which made it remove the game from its official (again, gasp!) website.
The game (which was again, removed from the website, just to be clear people!) Fuwa Fight the Winter Clouds had startling similarities with Snow Day, Cadin’s developed game. Both were made in Adobe flash format. Not only were there very strong similarities with the settings (small snowy town) to the characters and player goals in the game, but even with the (this one really earns a loud GASP!) coding. From the variables (which was really stupid for the Olympics website developers to do, since select all and change all functions are easily available for most code editing programs, if they really did copy the game of course) to the syntaxes, similarities were anything but scarce.
And, if they ever did copy Batrack’s games, the Beijing Olympics committee is being very silent about the whole issue, despite the fact that a whopping 7k is demanded as a fine from anyone who copies or pirates anything from their group (from the small logos in the website to the mascots, on a side note, someone should tell the Olympics committee that their mascot is not that cute too). At least a small apology would have been nice, but nope, they are still keeping silent about the whole thing. Sure piracy (plagiarism?) is the best form of flattery (or at least some retards claim for it to be so), but when it comes to gigantic corporations, it is also the best way to get sued (at least the Beijing Olympics committee knows that, because they took off their Fuwa Fight the Winter Clouds game off their site quickly enough (and it is also said that at least two other games from the Olympics site are also partially copied from other developers).
However, what most people are not aware of is the fact that although piracy is a serious problem that is worth taking a look at (and acting upon), it is not as bad as most companies make it out to be. Yes, piracy is wrong, piracy is illegal, and people who do it and support it should both be put to jail. BUT despite the fact that piracy takes away some business, it is not the sole reason why most games nowadays fall flat when it comes to sales. To be frank about the matter of sales crash of the most recently released games, gamers are not buying because of piracy, but because the games are not good enough for them. The lack of originality, overpricing and flat storylines are only a few reasons as to why the most recent games are not making a huge impact. So to the game developers out there, stop blaming the Chinese, instead, start making interesting games.
