Pirate Station

This view of "revenue neutral" piracy is supported by the fact that even on the most heavily pirated platforms, hugely anticipated or popular games still manage to rack up impressive sales. Widespread chipping of the PlayStation 2 didn't seem to hurt sales of games like Grand Theft Auto 3 and its sequels, or of the Final Fantasy series. The implication is that many pirates will download games they had no intention of buying, but want to check out anyway - while the big releases they're looking forward to, they'll pre-order and buy like everyone else.

The same seems to be true for other platforms where piracy is rampant, going by the download numbers. The PC can still turn out multi-million sellers - and it's worth noting that the recent apparent decline in PC revenues is heavily attributable not to piracy, but to the fact that statistics firm NPD doesn't track either sales over digital distribution services, or revenues from subscription games like World of Warcraft. WoW alone probably sucks over USD 1.5bn a year out of the global PC game market - it's only to be expected that that will have a knock-on effect on sales of other games.

Then there's the PSP - a platform which is at the heart of much chest-beating and wailing by the industry's anti-piracy cheerleaders. On the surface, the PSP should be the system that suffers most from piracy. Sony has, in essence, created a pirate's dream. Not only is it relatively easy to hack the system (it can be done without any soldering or even opening the case), but pirates actually get a better user experience than legitimate gamers - thanks to the ability to run pirate games off Memory Sticks, resulting in faster load times, better battery life and less noisy operation.

Certainly, plenty of PSP games end up on BitTorrent, and plenty of people are downloading them. However, the system's top games still manage to sell plenty of units - and those who point to the PSP's relatively low attach rate are seemingly forgetting that Sony has marketed the unit heavily as a multimedia device. It stands to reason that tons of PSPs out there simply weren't bought to play games - but when great games come along, they still manage to rack up sales.

So what's happening here? Are we really seeing a scenario where poor and mediocre games are being pirated - revenue-neutral piracy, which wouldn't have resulted in a sale anyway - but good, popular games are proportionally less affected? If so, doesn't this cast a new light on the industry's statements on piracy - suggesting that some publishers see it as an excuse for poor performance, as much as a persistent problem?

Those aren't rhetorical questions - I don't have the answers, and none of this is to say that piracy isn't a problem. If nothing else, it's totally understandable that those in the industry who work hard to create games feel angry and frustrated at the idea of people playing them for free - even if those people wouldn't have paid for them anyway.

However, if the industry is going to have a strategy on piracy, it first needs to have an internal discussion on piracy - and that discussion needs to move away from the past decade of tedious, repetitive panel debates at conferences, where everyone agrees that it's a terrible problem, that Something Must Be Done, and cites anecdotal evidence that doesn't actually mean a thing while the whole audience nods along.

It's a sacred cow. Nobody dares question the impact of piracy, because it's become one of the founding truths of the industry that it's a terrible thing that's damaging the whole market, a looming crisis whose severity can only be expressed by sucking in your lips, shaking your head sadly, and muttering nonsense about "thieves" and "stealing".

Until that sacred cow is slain, and people within the industry start showing willing to ask real, serious questions about the impact of piracy, nothing of merit will ever be done. Until we appreciate the real scale of the problem (and get over the fact that it's probably smaller than previous estimates suggest), all we're going to see are more pointless panel discussions and more Quixotic assaults on consumers. The industry's approach to piracy will remain, as it has been since the eighties, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.