A feature in which our fearless correspondent (STUART CAMPBELL) posits the suggestion that, in fact, piracy is a good thing for the videogames industry. Intrigued? Outraged? Really bored and nothing to do in the 10 minutes before your next appointment? Then read on, gentle viewer.

As the videogames industry stumbles through what looks like becoming – if it isn’t already – its longest and deepest period of confusion and uncertainty ever, it’s nice to know that there’s at least one thing that constant, and that’s the industry’s attitude towards piracy. Barely a week goes by without someone somewhere raging bitterly against the evil that’s destroying the entire business (as it has been, apparently, for the last 20 years), whether it’s a hard-pressed retailer, a software publisher CEO down to his last £5 million bonus, or some utterly deranged hack out to win some friends in high places and further his career beyond the dead-end that is specialist-press games journalism. Piracy is the one thing the industry has always presented a united front on.

But wait – what’s this? As you’ll doubtless all know as alert readers, CTW’s website (www.ctw.co.uk) runs a regular opinion poll, soliciting the industry’s feelings on a variety of important topics. One of the most recent concerned the issue of piracy, asking the question "Is piracy killing the games industry?", a vote which you’d be forgiven for thinking, given the demographic of the sample, was perhaps the biggest foregone conclusion of all time. And yet, discounting a rather desperate and ham-fisted attempt to rig the figures, when sources who shan’t be named here flooded the poll with large numbers of "Yes" votes over the course of a single hour during the two-week-long survey, the result saw a frankly amazing 72% of respondents voting "No", with another 10% wasting valuable seconds of their life by saying "Maybe", leaving just a tiny 18% of the industry apparently still clinging to the belief that piracy is a serious threat to our continued wellbeing. (Even if you allow the fiddled votes, still just 36% voted "Yes".) What the heck’s going on here? Someone better investigate.

Traditionally, the industry and its spokesbodies have always maintained, as a matter of policy, a very extreme and dogmatic stance on piracy. The Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA), the US equivalent of ELSPA, currently claims on its website that piracy cost the US games industry alone a staggering $3.2 billion in 1998 - for reference, the same site gives the total revenue generated by the industry in the same year as $5.5 billion. (ELSPA claims, even more dramatically, that the UK industry lost £3 billion last year – almost as much as the entire US industry’s income - on legitimate revenues of just £1 billion.) No reasoning is given for the estimate of $3.2bn, but the figure is repeated often by the organisation, especially when justifying its policy of forcing the closure of emulator websites offering downloadable versions of 20-year-old Commodore 64 games and suchlike. But it was this policy that first saw parts of the industry breaking ranks from the unwavering position that all piracy of any kind was, by definition, automatically bad full stop.

During a particularly heavy crackdown which saw IDSA force the closure of many popular support sites for the arcade emulator MAME, significant number of authors, developers and even some publishers made explicit statements allowing their back catalogue of (mostly 8-bit) titles to be freely distributed worldwide via the web, as long as no money was involved. (Capcom went a stage further, allowing a number of its old titles to be bundled with a special joystick developed by a third party for use with MAME.)

The significance of this breakthrough was that, for the first time ever, elements of the industry were conceding in public not only that piracy didn’t necessarily always cause harm to the business, but that it could actually be beneficial, both through the free advertising brought about by raising consumer awareness of the intellectual properties that WERE still being exploited in the form of modern remakes of classic games - such as Hasbro’s Frogger and Activision’s Asteroids and Space Invaders - and through the generation of simple goodwill. (Ordinary people resent being told that they’re despicable criminals for playing a 20-year-old arcade game that no longer exists in any commercial form, produced by a company long since defunct. They’re also not nearly stupid enough to blindly swallow lurid, self-defeating propaganda such as the industry’s regular assertions that all pirates are crack-dealing Nazi paedophiles who are as likely to kneecap your grandmother as sell you a cheap copy of FIFA 2000, or that, as ELSPA’s website sobs, "Publishers and developers make mere pennies per sale of an original game.")

Of course, though the abandoning of the previously-inviolable principle was important, old emulated games are only a small fraction of the piracy issue. The real heart of the matter is the widespread piracy of games which are on retail shelves right now. (Or in some extreme cases, not yet even on the shelves at all.) And surely that’s an unquestionably bad thing? Except, as both CTW’s poll and an increasing groundswell of grass-roots opinion both inside and outside the industry shows, it would seem not. Indeed, support is growing for the previously heretical belief that piracy is actually, implausible though it may seem, largely GOOD for the industry. The only sensible thing to do, then, is to examine the two sides of the argument.

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Before we can establish why piracy is good, we ought first to establish why it isn’t bad. One of the problems always associated with having a sensible debate about piracy is the absence of any real figures, especially in regard to whether you can equate pirated copies of games with copies that would have been purchased legitimately if piracy didn’t exist, and hence with money which has been genuinely "lost" to the industry.

However, for the first time ever, there ARE now some relevant and undisputed figures which shed some light on the issue, albeit ones not directly involving games. Napster, the high-profile web network which allows people to trade - mostly illegal - MP3 recordings of pop songs, has recently been the subject of strenuous attempts by the US recording industry (in the shape of its own trade body, the RIAA) to have it closed down, so far without success. Like IDSA and ELSPA, the RIAA claims that Napster does huge and irreparable damage to the industry by taking money away from the recording companies, and that people who would otherwise spend money on CDs download the contents from Napster instead. However, Napster recently showed that despite over a billion downloads being made through Napster servers last year, the music industry in fact had its best year ever for CD sales.

Now, it’s impossible to imagine that if piracy had a real effect on sales, a billion-download piracy source suddenly springing up overnight, as Napster did, wouldn’t make a significant difference. And yet, it didn’t. (Parallelling the emulation issue, most artists who’ve commented so far have actually spoken up in favour of Napster, including the high-profile likes of Radiohead, Courtney Love, Offspring and Public Enemy.) Which would seem to powerfully support the view that people primarily either only pirate things that they weren’t going to buy anyway, or use pirate copies as samplers, and still go out and buy the stuff they actually like. (Because most people are bright enough to realise that if no-one ever buys records by the bands they like, those bands won’t survive to make more records for them to enjoy.)

It’s only a short step from there to get to the realisation that this actually has a significantly beneficial effect for the industry. If there’s one thing that people hate, it’s wasting their money. If you buy a stream of terrible albums full of one great single and a load of crap filler tracks, eventually you’re going to get fed up of buying albums altogether. If, on the other hand, you only buy albums that you like, because you tried them out first, you’re going to have nothing but positive feelings about the process, and you’re going to keep right on buying more albums until you die. You’ll discover new artists that you otherwise would never have heard (because you’d wasted all your CD-buying money on terrible filler-track albums before you got to the new stuff) and buy their records for years to come. End result? More people buying more records. Because of piracy.

The logic applies just as well to the games industry, only even more so because of the much higher price of games compared to music - it doesn’t take many bad games before you’ve wasted some pretty hefty sums of money and developed a pretty negative attitude about the whole idea. And gamers aren’t any stupider than music fans – they know that game companies have to make money to keep making games, and that that won’t happen if they don’t buy legitimate software. But people have a finite budget for their chosen leisure activities, and cracking down on piracy won’t change that any. (ELSPA’s figures suggest the average UK gamer spends £200 a year on games, which sounds about right. Without piracy, ELSPA says, every gamer would magically find and spend another £600 annually. Hmm.)