PIRACY IN THE NAUGHTIES

"I like how so many of you people seem to be willfully killing your platform of choice. Keep downloading games in the millions and you eventually won’t have any left, companies just won’t bother making them."

Well, the first decade of the 21st century is coming to a close and its been a pretty wild one. One of the new concepts which came into its own this decade is internet piracy. The concept of pirating copyrighted materials is not new, but doing so with internet file sharing became an issue this decade and this century. It started before Napster was invented but the sharing of files before then was primarily done on individual "bulletin board" systems. With Napster, the pirating and sharing of files on your computer became a huge industry.

Napster was shut down, but it was like cutting the head off the hydra: in its place dozens of alternatives have grown to replace it. Each time one is taken out, another takes its place - or more than one. And at the present there seems no real way to stop the trading of copyrighted files.

This last year saw plenty of piracy like the years before it. The website Torrent Freak has several lists of the files most pirated online (using BitTorrent, at least). Here's the top 5 downloaded on PC:

1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
2. The Sims 3
3. Prototype
4. Need for Speed: Shift
5. Street Fighter IV

They also have X-Box and Wii most pirated games (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and New Super Mario Brothers). The PC version of Call of Duty clocked up 4.1 million downloads according to Ernesto, more than double last year's big download Spore.

Instead of stealing these games, why not sign up for Gamefly or Ongo Bongo and get Netflix-style game rentals? Its 22 bucks a month and you can keep the game as long as you want, with no late fees. That way at least you can see if a game is going to be any good, and if you like it you can buy a copy later.

Yet if you read the comments you get a sense why people are downloading Modern Warfare 2 so much. Certainly there's a huge interest in the game and people want to play it without paying (or despite the fact that they cannot afford to buy it). Nobody wants to say that, but its the primary reason. However, the makers of the game also didn't help themselves much with the way they released the game for PC, as a commenter explains:

Ditto to all the statements above. Modern Warfare 2 is the most pirated game because the developers (Infinity Ward) chose to take the lazy way out and make it a dumbed down piece of S console port that was immediately released on pc.

NO dedicated servers. NO mods. NO console commands even. NO self-server selection. NO LAN multiplayer support for pc. What do they give you? A game slightly more than a rehash of MW1 so it’s MW1.5 more like it. They give you auto pairing/match making which is CRAP, made even crappier by the fact you only can play on IWNet servers.

For all the reasons above. I’d say Modern Warfare 2 DESERVED to be 2009’s most pirated game. AND DESERVES to be continue to be pirated! At $60, the game is a bloody ripoff too, $10 more than regular PC game titles… and with what, 10% the multiplayer functionality. No thanks. I’d take my money and spend it on some other REAL game like Battlefield 2 Bad Company for PC.

Its wrong to steal games and pirate copyrighted material, but at the same time, these companies are acting in ways which encourage people to do so as well.

People are going to try to steal your product, no matter what it is. You can sell oranges and people will try to shoplift them. That's wrong and I sympathize with sellers. Yet there's no reason to antagonize your customers, and companies just do not seem to understand that.