History of Video game Piracy

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This assignment is to connect the past to the present. I am looking for a history paper, not a science essay.You could refer to piracy/anti-piracy acts and mechanisms in video games throughout the years and show some game examples. You can talk about what is the first piracy game? How did people think about the piracy game? What is the first game using the online encryption mechanisms? Something like that. Please focus on game history. Also, please link the relevant sources where you talk about them.

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Running Head: HISTORY OF VIDEO GAME PIRACY

History of Video Game Piracy
Institutional Affiliation
Date

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HISTORY OF VIDEO GAME PIRACY

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Video game piracy is simply unauthorized of audiovisual works which are covered by the
copyright laws in a way that violates the rights of the copyright owner and violates his
intellectual rights, in most cases leading to financial gain to the person pirating and substantial
financial losses to the copyright owner. since the advent of commercialized video gaming, video
game piracy has been an emotive issue with the big video game companies reporting losses
running to colossal sums of money. For instance, in 2010, the Business software alliance of the
United States asserted that the general software piracy losses in the entire world were $51 Billion
with the bulk of the losses emanating from video gaming piracy.
It is, however, worth noting that with the advent of technology and increased encryption
and security features, the losses in gaming income as a result of piracy has drastically reduced
and is currently negligible compared to the income generated by the commercial players in the
gaming industry. The history of the video game piracy could be traced back in three main parts
namely the cassette tapes of the early and mid-1980s, the dedicated console of mid and late 80s
and the rise of CDs in the 1990s (Depoorter, 2014).
Cassette tape period
Depoorter (2014) asserts that the gaming industry suffered immense losses at the
beginning of commercialized video gaming when video gaming was offered on cassette tapes.
This is due to the fact that the cassettes had little or no security features and were easy target for
unscrupulous and corrupt businessmen who would only buy one original cassette tape and
duplicate the rest thus denying the video game company substantial income. Though the
counterfeit copies did not have clear features as the original, the pirated copies were selling at
cheaper rates and most of the time the video gaming companies could not recoup their profits

HISTORY OF VIDEO GAME PIRACY

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and ended up closing their businesses. The security features were in a simply coded language
which could be accessed or encoded by an average computer savvy individual even after the
video gaming companies started requiring access codes as an added security feature. The cassette
tape period is regarded as a period whereby the developers of video games suffered supernormal
losses since the cassette could be easily duplicated by the growing numbers of video gamers who
were not ready to spend big in purchasing original tapes. This is the period which is regarded as
the arms race period between pirates and developers.
The Emergence of the Dedicated Console
To militate against the loss of income as a result of pirated video game cassettes, the
gaming industry developed the game specialized consoles which ensured families could play
their favorite video games without using the personal computer as is the case with cassette tapes.
The advent of specialized co...


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