Pity the Pirate?

It isn’t every day that you read a news article that truly makes you think. Being a gamer, today’s news that Microsoft had dropped the banhammer on 600,000 players who had accessed Xbox Live with a “modified” console coloured me interested. A quick click through to an article by the BBC’s “Newsbeat” followed, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

The Offending Article, M’lud
In the article, the BBC sympathetically speaks to poor “Raz,” an Xbox 360 gamer who admits that he’s a pirate. On the BBC website, like any wise person would do. He claims to have pirated about 30 to 40 games (although he’s been watching the pirate scene for at least two years, since he “knows” that nobody’s been banned for that long, so I’d say he’s probably sitting on a couple of hundred discs by now), making a saving of £600 (I make that closer to £2,000, given that he claims that every new game costs £50) and now he’s spat the dummy and is “in shock” “as if his dog had died” because he’s been banned from Xbox Live after firing up Modern Warfare 2 – which he apparently waited until launch day to play, like a good little gamer, despite the fact it was available to download at least 8 days earlier.

Well, boo fucking hoo.

The Defence
His reasoning for piracy? Well, he claims that games are too expensive and although that’s fair enough if you’re buying games once in a while, with the current slew of high-quality titles “everyone wants to play them all” and so therefore the “£50” price tag on new titles is too much. As Raz informs us, “There are 16-year-old kids out there, they don’t earn money so they go screaming to their parents saying, ‘Can you buy me this game?” and he thinks that it’s a bit beyond a joke. Poor little mites.

This “Faux-Court” thing is growing old already…
Maybe, Raz, it would do those parents good to turn to their kids and say “NO” once in a while. Just a thought. It’s not like the majority of those little angels are living in hardship with their mobile phones, iPods and – oh, yeah – £200 games consoles, is it? After all, I want Isla Fisher and Cameron Diaz, but I can’t afford the plastic surgery required to look like a movie star. Doesn’t mean I’m going to do me a bit of kidnapping, does it?

You done got served.

Secondly, my old mate, has nobody told you that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was available for just £20 at some retailers on launch day? A few weeks before, FIFA 10 (another very, very big title) was available for £24 on launch day. Failing the on-going supermarket price wars, a lot of retailers are offering trade-in schemes that can dramatically reduce the price of games. I know, I couldn’t fucking believe it either, but all you have to do is play through these games that you love so dearly, and then trade them in and get a decent bit of money off the next title that you want to play. Or, you could sell them on eBay for two thirds of the price you paid for them – everyone loves a bargain, it seems, even if that bargain is covered in scratches and child’s vomit and is only a tenner cheaper than retail. Failing that, for less than £20 a month, you can rent three games from LoveFilm or the like for as long as you want, only sending them back once you’ve completed them or got bored with them. I personally got Modern Warfare 2 for £9.99 when I traded Tekken 6 (which cost me a tenner on launch day after a trade-in) at HMV.

You know what, though? If I was REALLY desperate to pick up a new release and “couldn’t afford it,” I would cut back on something else so that I could. Do I really need to be propping up the bar on Friday AND Saturday night when I could forgo one evening and buy that game instead? Do I really need to order £20 worth of pizza for me and my buddies on a Wednesday evening when I could just get off my arse and cook them something, and have an extra £20 towards that game? Maybe our boy Raz could consider similar actions. Either that, or realise that just because something is new, doesn’t mean that you HAVE to own it on day one. You could, y’know, wait until money maybe isn’t so tight. Credit crunch, my arse. After all, if you and your 599,999 buddies have all “saved” £600 apiece by pirating 30 to 40 games – and you can be damned sure that the majority will have stacks more than that – then you’ve collectively “saved” over £360million. Don’t bother taking your shoes off to see how much that is…because I can tell you that you’ll be a good 359,999,980 short.

How many jobs could have been “saved” in the games industry with that amount of money, do you think? I say it again – credit crunch, my arse. Action. Reaction.

As Raz himself will tell you, “I’m 25 years old, I’m a massive Xbox gamer. I play every day after work and all day on the weekends” – and yet he doesn’t want to pay for the privilege. He seems to think that these games are made by people who don’t actually need to be paid for the work that they do, and that the likes of Infinity Ward do it just for fun. I wonder if Raz would go to work for nothing? If Raz’s boss ever reads this, I would LOVE for him to withhold a week’s wages and claim that its because although he wants to pay everyone every week, it all gets a bit much sometimes and therefore he’s taking Raz’s labour for free. Let’s see how pricey those games look then.

“At first I was in shock, I mean it’s always at the back of your head using pirate games you know there’s that possibility but you haven’t heard about it, there’s been no warnings and you haven’t heard it happen to anyone in the last two years.”

Yes, Raz, because you think that Microsoft should specifically say “Hey, do you know what? If you break the law (and copyright theft is against the law, before anyone starts) by paying someone to modify your console and then pirating games, despite the fact that pretty much every gaming site on the Internet has a story about Microsoft banning people (in the last six months, not – as you claim – from pre-2007) you’ll be banned from Xbox Live. Next time. This is a warning, don’t do it again, you scamp!”  when you sign in to Xbox Live. You knew what you were doing. You knew you could be banned from Live and…yep…you went and did it anyway to save a buck. Given that you’ve “saved” £600 (£2,000) from your activities, I reckon you can afford £180 for a new Elite and about £420 worth of games, so you can get back on your precious Xbox Live, don’t you?

“I wasn’t expecting it. I was just like, ‘OK, what do I do now? Is this just a joke?’ So I thought, ‘Let me restart the Xbox’. I restarted, signed in again, same message. I did that three times, same message. I was pulling my hair out thinking, ‘No, why me?’”

Verdict: Idiot
If it was a joke, it would be a fucking hilarious one, I tell you. However, if I may be so bold Raz, I’d say that the answer to your question of “why me?” is simply “because you’re a damned pirate.” My Xbox Live subscription is still current and I’m having a blast with MW2, FIFA 10 and Rock Band 2 this evening. I wouldn’t say that you’ve been singled out, given that 600,000 accounts have been given the boot and everyone on my friends list is still able to connect, so wipe your nose, mop up those crocodile tears and get a real fucking problem.

Or, to put it in your probable vernacular, “CNSQNCS R A BTCH.”

You can check out the banning news, and the interview with Raz over at BBC News.