"Game Developers Should Love Their Pirates", says Tadhg Kelly

Designer Tadhg Kelly supports that piracy, as well as any other means of making a game popular, should be seen as a great opportunity to the industry, according to this post at Gamasutra.

His opinions -- mainly advising developers to turn their games into franchises, in order to gather consumers on the long run -- are quite interesting from the point of view of profit seeking game developers, but how positive is it for the sake of gaming as an art form?

The Piracy Isse

Anyone unlucky enough as to enter my bedroom would certainly note the sixteen original GameCube games, the seven Wii ones, the three Xbox 360’s, the eight PSP’s , the fifteen DS’s and the three Dreamcast’s games piled on my shelf. If such a person were to ask me for more, I would gladly show the box where my nine SNES’ and seven N64’s games are placed, as well as the digital copy of Mass Effect I have purchased from Live and installed on my Xbox HD. A further research would reveal dozens of CDs chaotically distributed all over the room and the twenty-something DVDs on my cabinet — not to mention the ones spread on other rooms of the house, including the countless seasons of TV series on the living room.

This might not sound that impressive if you are American or European, but when you live on a country where games cost twice as much as in the US, people are paid half as much, and “alternative” versions of all those games and movies are sold for less than US$5 on every corner, it takes a lot of will for one to stick to the legality.

That said, I love the theme of piracy.

If I ever see a discussion on the internet where people criticize the “pirates” while others defend their "right" to buy counterfeit products, I just feel an urge to step in. This is due to a number of reasons, but mostly it’s due to my anger against the “lies” that have spread around the world and that dominates this kind of discussion.

It is not to say that I approve piracy. Nor does it mean that I reprove it. I only dream with a world in which the matter is truly understood and discussed based on arguments, rather than absurdities.

So, here’s my altruist and heroic effort to lead the world closer to this utopia.