Sony Asia president discusses repercussions of piracy

THEN I noticed the one on the left looks disturbingly old for her size. Like, to an natural extent and oh my God do I need to sleep before this gets any worse.

She's a cute baby girl, so maybe her mother is hot.

Do you want to report yourself to the authorities before things get out of hand?

No, I bet those toddlers aren't even magical.

Um, I mean, not that I take that into account.

He's referring to piracy on the PS2 and the PSP.

You don't understand Sony's bitching?? You can't pirate on their console?? http://www.joystiq.com/2009/04/21/sonys-peter-dille-thinks-psp-piracy-is-sickening/

There is piracy on PSP and PS2 which they are still selling and releasing new games for.

From you comment, you probably don't know, but there's a big piracy scene on the PSP...

didn't know.

*about face*

you can´t pirate games on the ps3 (all the other consoles are pirate-able) just because blue rays are expensive, plain simple. When blue rays are cheaper you are going to see hundreds of copies. But this really shows how idiotic this pirate topic is, sony has virtually no pirate problems on the ps3 (like wii or xbox) but they still complain??? and sorry but wasn´t this supposed to be a pc only problem? (or at least that what everybody alway said) and now it´s a problem with the only console that is not having piracy at least for the moment? right.......

I thoroughly enjoy my PS2 hard drive and booting games off of it. The loading screens are 10x faster. Do I own the games on my HD? Yup. I have more games for my PS2 than any other console I own. They were cheaper.

@hunter:
Way to miss the point of the article. Downvoted.

The PSP and PS2 have piracy issues. Even in the heyday of the PS1, the PS1 suffered from a great deal of piracy as well. Moving into a completely different storage media is just a temporary solution for the PS3 given that MOST (if not all) PS3 games are region-free. What Sony has learned about piracy is that the initial cases of piracy started out benign, like wanting to import US or Japanese games and getting around the region-lock. What really happened is that the modchips that circumvent the region-lock have the side effect of allowing people to play unsigned code (read: backup games). Once people found out about that, that's where the whole piracy turned negative.

What Sony is doing right now is to give people a notice that piracy harms the gaming industry and to encourage people to support the creative development of game developers to try to minimize the damage to PS3 developers and mitigate the damage to PSP and PS2 developers. Everyone knows about piracy on the PS2 and PSP platforms, so this is Sony's goodwill gesture to the videogame community to grow up and support the developers.

I pay money for cable, I shouldn't have to sit through advertisements. Advertisements were a way to keep TV free. Not anymore though. Now they're in our fucking movie theaters too.

Advertising just needs to change to keep up with the times. Don't worry, there's plenty of online Behavioral Targeting and Google Ads out there. We are already seeing TV ads replaced by in-service ads, like the pop-ups or the embedded links on TiVo. Plus, Kevin is write - how can skipping ads be piracy when we are paying for the damn service?

*right* wow, haven't made that mistake for 20 years.

how is that ironic, maybe that is exactly why it was delivered there.

The keynote was delivered in Singapore. Get your geography straight.

Even if only a small percentage of total pirated copies would have been sales, a huge amount of money has been lost. Obviously it's insane when a company claims that every single pirated copy is a lost sale, but it's not as if piracy doesn't hurt them.

Well I wasn't necessarily trying to imply that piracy doesn't hurt them. It's a legitimate concern, for sure. But it doesn't hurt them nearly as much as they claim, nor would a small percentage of piracy turning into actual sales become a huge amount of money. Well, not directly for the developer anyway. If you calculate it at 50 or 60 bucks per game then yes, it's a lot of money. But there are a lot of people that get a chunk of that before it gets back to the devs.

That is (by far) the worst pro pirate excuse and it comes up so fucking often. If you weren't going to buy it in the first place ,but you want to enjoy the use of it that is the definition of a thief.

Ignore the money side of the business. How about the infringement of intellectual properties? Doesn't matter how big or small you think the (potential) financial loss is to the developers, piracy is a criminal offence. FULL STOP.

I know you weren't, but I hear that argument all the time. As you stated, there are a lot of people that get a piece of the profit from every video game sold. This includes retailers, developers, rights holders, and numerous other entities. While I'm sure it could be argued at length, for the purposes of my argument, I'll assume that each entity is equally deserving of their cut.

If a game that costs 60 dollars gets pirated 1 million times (which, I'll admit, only happens with highly anticipated PC games) that is a 60 million dollar loss, if you count every title. Now, depending on what percentage would have actually been sales, it could still be a very large number. 50% would be 30 million dollars. The percentage would be different for every title, but it isn't hard to see how there could be a substantial financial loss (though, as you've pointed out, that loss is spread over various entities). For an indie dev, the number wouldn't even need to be nearly that impressive. 100k in sales could be the difference between bankruptcy and a successful game (for indie devs).



o/ Do what you want cause' a pirate is free, you are a PIRATEEEE \o


(all math subject to being wrong due to my shitty math skills)

Yomachaser, it's actually the definition of Blockbuster Video. Or Netflix.

I think the piracy scene in Asia is much different than the one here. Most of the pirates I know just download what they want over BitTorrent and burn it themselves, whereas it seems that some Asian markets have a prominence of actual sales of pirated copies in street-side stalls. Therefore, while I don't think of US piracy as equating to lost sales all that much (at the very least because money isn't changing hands), companies can claim that Asian piracy results in "lost" sales as far as the money that did change hands. I don't know the true extent of this problem over there, but it's the image I have in my mind due to second-hand accounts of visits there and hearing about the huge knock-off industry in general.

The fact that these vendors aren't in jail implies a laissez-faire attitude on behalf of the governments there. Maybe the Asian game companies should hire some goons to go around busting up stalls themselves (they'd easily pay their own salary).

Well first, I didn't expect my comment to illicit this much of a response. Second, I never said I was pro-pirating or anti-pirating. I stay fairly neutral on the subject for a number of reasons, mostly moral fiber reasoning.

@yomachaser - So borrowing from my friend is stealing now?

@makimak22 - When did I say it wasn't? As a matter of fact, I never said or implied that piracy was ok or wasn't wrong. You're putting words in my post.

@bananaboat - Honestly, I won't even begin to speculate on what they actually get per copy after everyone gets their cut.

@aristokrat - The piracy you mention is very different from what I initially think when someone talks about this subject. I agree 100% with you that someone that pirates a game/movie/whatever and sells it for profit should be locked up and fined. I think too that is where a lot of confusion is coming up from my initial comment and the actual piracy I was referencing. I wasn't talking about piracy in the sense of those that pirate for money.

Does it make it any more or less wrong no matter how you look at it? Not by definition, no, but pirating for money is much more morally wrong than doing it for necessity or to enjoy something. And I'm sure you're all going to accuse me of being a pirate or something, so I'll put it out right now. Yes I have downloaded stuff, yes I had a cracked PS1 and PS2, but not anymore. That was back in the day when I didn't have the money to afford to buy what I wanted because I was a kid, but a kid with enough know-how and knew the right people to do that crap.

No i wouldn't condemn someone if they told me they downloaded this or that, it'd be hypocritical of me to. But I would sling 'em through the mud if they said they sold it to make a buck.

I feel it's wrong no one has added o/ YAR HAR FIDDLEDEDEE \o yet.

@Blank-Mage - Yeah, I was hoping for that, but nobody did it. Now it's no longer talk like a pirate day, so there is no point...wait...what am I saying....





o/ If you love to sail the sea, you are a PIRATE!!!!!! \o

Forgot to mention, that, for the most part, those that pirate games never would have purchased them to begin with.

Very few, however, actually use "piracy" to test games before they buy them. These days $30 to $60 is a lot of money to waste on a game you won't like.

I downloaded Fallout 3 well before I bought it. Mainly because I love RPGs, but hate FPS games. Test phase, you know?

Honestly, I'll do that with some games. Especially if there's no demo available (PC). I can't count how many times I've downloaded a game just to go out and actually buy it because it was so good and I wanted to experience all of the game (online multiplayer, updates and added content, so on).

Actually, I will test certain games where I haven't fully committed myself to purchase or not purchase. It's why demos are nice to have. Without demos, I basically have to stare hard at the cover art of the game at a retail store to determine whether I should buy it or not. I fucked up by not buying ICO and Shadow of the Colossus exactly because the cover art for both games outright sucked.

Remember, not everyone has the time nor the money to subscribe to and read video game magazines and some magazines are known for outright lying about a game just because it's on a particular platform.

There are a number of games on my PSX that are back-ups, even though my PSX library vastly outnumbers the back-ups. How it turned out that way was because I played the back-up games, then decided that I liked it enough to go and hunt it down. GameStop back then barely existed and was miserable when it came to figuring out whether they had something or not. The following is a list of PSX games that I hunted down after playing their back-up version:
-Brave Fencer Musashi
-DewPrism (Threads of Fate)
-Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure (if you're wondering where the RosenQueen store came from, it came from THIS game)
-Legend of Dragoon
-Valkyrie Profile (this one actually sold out before I could pick it up, had to use eBay to get my hands on it)
-Tales of Phantasia (was never released in the US, so I picked it up for the PSP)
-Tales of Destiny
-Star Ocean: The Second Story
-Vandal Hearts
-Thousand Arms
-Tail Concerto
-Grandia
-Wild Arms 1 & 2

So yeah, in my case, if a game can maintain my attention for the first two hours or so, I'll most likely buy it. If it fails that test, then I'm most likely not going to buy it nor bother to continue it. That's just my personal experience though.

Just because I shoot guys in a video game does not mean I want to shoot guys in real life, and I definitely don't want to get shot at.

Circus Clowns? That's a very strange way of looking at entertainment, especially since entertainment existed before clowns ffs.