There was a brief statement of a Polish guy yesterday, who said that he will play a pirated copy, because the Polish economy is worse than the Western one, thus giving him a good reason to do it...
Unfortunately, he may have forgot to tell you that in every poor nation, in which category Poland or Romania are just at home right now, games are a privilege of the middle and upper classes...which are not poor, by Western standards. In Bucharest, for example, the streets are filled with pirated-version sellers, on whose tables lie at least 100-200 CDs.... and the consummers of such a sub-product are mostly rich people, teenagers with state of the arts cars etc....
The most common argument is that we are poor. Which cannot be supported. A computer game isn't very expensive, considering that you spend playing it a year without any problems (and Paradox games usually are of this kind).
Yes, but we need to try it out first. No problems, there is always a demo version of the game (several computer magazines give away free CDs with demos) or, at least, a piece of useful information (like the Paradox released video or this forum).
Yes, but we need to have more games, in order not to get bored. Yes, this is a very common answer. A typical romanian student, with a very good computer, owns about 100 games, most of them unpatchable, and plays about 5-10% of them...but the money goes to the pirate, of course... I have played HoI for 7 months now and I'm still hooked...EU2? What can I say? For over an year and it still finds place on my HDD. A man that plays Medal of Honour in a day and then throws it away might be persuaded by the pirate to buy it, but how can a person that plays the same game for months claim that it was too expensive?
I was kind of disturbed (and expressed it directly in the OT forum) by the fact that so many western people pirate games, in spite of their financial position. Then I remembered the Eastern European situation. It really isn't about national income or consciousness, it's about the fact that several persons think that they are privileged by their situation to take advantage of a certain mismatch of the system. We have this situation among our students, which are the greatest pirates. Let me give you an example. A month ago, some experts came to install a meta-network for the Regie campus, the greatest romanian student campus. They were shocked. Youngsters who seemed dirt-poor owned the latest computer hardware, latest computer software (this one pirated, of course) and their internal network is
greater than the whole kazaa system... Basically, in that zone, piracy is at its finest. You can virtually find every movie, song, game or piece of software you'll ever need. They manage to hack whole sites and systems, use credit-card means to get things for free? But every student has an explanation: the big corporations are sucking all the money, why should we support them?
Now, the last points I want to make:
a)the truth is that the Paradox games are rarely found in Romania... and I know there isn't a big market for them in that part of the word, but hopefully Victoria will arrive and it will make some of its fans very happy (me included)
b)I haven't seen a romanian Victoria pirated version (and, before anyone says anything, yes, I know a lot of pirates and hackers, but I am unable to resist a beautiful box and beautiful patches, I have seen a lot of pirated games, and I usually buy them...) ... trust me, in Romania, most players prefer FPS, so Paradox takes minimal casualties, but still...
c)Piracy has become more aggressive, flooding the market with patchable versions of several games, which are indeed damaging to the whole gaming community system. And, unfortunately, it's very hard to detect them...
d)I want to thank Patric for allowing me in the beta team, even though I am in a country that is way too dangerous to newly-released games. From the beginning, I had people who desired Victoria on a burned disk, but, even if I have a CD-writer, I told them to take a hike, to try something else, because they won't appreciate this game if they don't appreciate the hard work put in it...
Looking at the whole thing, I realise I said nothing...in so many words
