The BBC is today reporting that the videogame industry have seen a twenty percent rise in the illegal downloading of software in the past five years. The figure comes from research firm Envisional, and also suggests that the top five games from 2010 were pirated online almost a million times.
The report, live now at BBC’s Newsbeat, states that industry executives are worried about these figures, as they might lead to ‘a generation of people [that] will expect to get games for free’. Talking
to Sam, a young UK gamer, the report candidly reveals the habits of a videogame pirate. Sam refused to give his surname, though maintained he did not fear prosecution.
“I buy games because I’ve pirated them, if I don’t get to try them I never would have bothered picking them up.” Sam tells the BBC. “I’ve never been fined. I’ve been doing this since I was 14 and I’m now 23… Games that I enjoy I purchase, ones that I don’t enjoy I delete.”
However, the video games industry view all piracy as theft. Andy Payne, chairman of the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment (UKIE), states that the cost of videogame piracy is immeasurable and damaging to the industry. Payne suggests that the answer lies in offering fair-priced alternatives to illegal downloads, and offered the following commentary to the BBC.
“You can be playing that game every single day for a year… Look at FIFA, Modern Warfare, Black Ops, those games people are playing all the time. That’s great value.
“[Some] 200, 250 people sat in a studio for two years building the latest Modern Warfare 3,” says Andy Payne. “This costs real money.”
Videogame piracy is of course as issue, just as it is for the music and motion-picture industries. No digital entertainment industry has yet found a way to combat piracy, though the music industry has famously tried many different counter measures. Electronic Theatre will keep you updated with all the latest evidence suggesting the extent of videogame piracy, and the measures taken to combat it.
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