I found out about this on the rllmukforum. What we have is a guy with a website, called World of Stuart, who charges £2 a month membership. In exchange you can download from him a huge amount of other people’s copyright material, both games and music. So he is making money from other people’s work.
As you will see he is offering 125 Playstation games converted to run on the Sony PSP, no wonder proper PSP games don’t sell very well. Here is a pirate damaging the game industry.
Here is a cut and paste of what he is offering:
– several hours of live Glastonbury Festival recordings.
– the complete never-released-on-DVD 1972 TV movie La Cabina.
– the Cannon Fodder 2 Official Soundtrack, a 40-song double CD of the key songs that inspired the No.1 Amiga game.
– Visual Pinball 3D conversions for the PC of the 12 tables from classic pinball games Pinball Dreams, Pinball Dreams 2 and Pinball Illusions.
– audio recordings of several complete comedy sets from the 2005 Edinburgh Festival, featuring top-rated acts including Stewart Lee, Jerry Sadowitz, Richard Herring and Daniel Kitson.
– the WoS Christmas Album, a beautiful collection of melancholy-but-pretty tunes to help you through those cold, bleak winter months.
– the complete never-released-in-the-West PC game Typing Space Harrier, rescued for posterity from the world of Japanese abandonware.
– £50 in free cash (no strings, no deposit, no credit card details required, just plain old-fashioned free money) from the online gaming site poker770.com.
– over 125 Playstation 1 games, mostly never released in Europe, converted and compressed for use on the PSP by users with custom firmware installed.
– over 300 rare and unavailable Spectrum games collected, compiled and converted for use with the SpeccyDS emulator for the Nintendo DS.
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Yeah, that’s the “bad” piracy. Someone making money from it (and some others paying!). That guy should go to prison.
But it is nowhere near the “usual” piracy, that allegedly so much damage does to the industry.
PS.- Going with the EuroGamer article, you know, the one about pirates giving a better user experience than the publishers, if PS1 games can be played in PSP, why isn’t Sony paying a big sum of money to the author and putting all those games out at $5?. Or in packs of 5 great games for $15?. Or even free? (just so people buy the PSP).
I’m speaking from total ignorance there, if there’s any kind of official sale of PS1 games from Sony (not speaking about ports here), disregard my PS.
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From the homepage –
“World Of Stuart is financially affiliated with Play-Asia”
I wonder if it is worthwhile emailing Play-Asia to inform them that they are supporting pirates, encourage them to reconsider whether this is the type of person they want promoting their business. That’s the big deal here. No legislation or laws will ever stop piracy of this nature, but creating an economic environment where Piracy is less profitable will hit them where it hurts.
I wrote a lengthy blog post discussing these kind of ideas a while back if anyone is interested.
http://savygamer.blogspot.com/2008/03/so-i-hear-pc-gaming-is-dead-what-can-i.html
I’m off to email Play-Asia
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“I’m speaking from total ignorance there, if there’s any kind of official sale of PS1 games from Sony (not speaking about ports here), disregard my PS.”
There is, albeit a pathetically limited selection, for play on both the PS3 and PSP at £3.49 a game.
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Sorry but I’m going to disagree that this is the “worst kind of piracy”. WoS appears to specialise in the more extremes of retro / classic gaming – Japanese releases that never made it into Europe, old PS/Speccy games, etc. This isn’t like a “paid for” Pirate Bay / isohunt which, imho, do far more damage than this ever will. It’s more like an illegal avenue into the kind of fun stuff that pops-up on ebay vintage gaming now and again.
If they were offering GTA IV, CoD4 and the usual collection of cracked casual games then I’d agree this warrants action. As it stands this is probably about as close to the mild end of the piracy spectrum as you can get. Probably the only significant damage being done here is to companies who trade in classic games.
I do not have a subscription with the site, just calling the shots as I see them from the info available.
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That site is also breaking the terms of its forum hosting by charging for access to parts of the forum as well as the discussions about “subscriber bonuses” (i.e. pirated material).
See http://invisionfree.com/index.php?p=tos sections 3.1 and 13 for confirmation.
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This bloke even has the cheek to use the tagline, “Paying for stuff you like? How old-fashioned!” Absolutely incredible
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Yes, while I don’t dispute the central point at all, many (but not all) of those items are LEGALLY piracy, I do challenge the blog owner or any other interested party to find a place I can legally purchase anything in that list.
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The music.
The comedy sets.
Readily available.
In Stewart Lee’s email newsletter he specifically asks anyone who buys his DVDs from gofasterstripe.com not to copy them – “I need this” he says.
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So have you reported him to FAST Bruce? I know I bloody would.
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I’m hoping that the oxygen of publicity will shame him into not being such an idiot.
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ARRRRRRR!
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GET IN!
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The commercially available stuff he’s selling is very much a no-no and you are right to complain about that.
But the speccy games modded to work on a DS? the japanese games they, in all of their infinate wisdom, refuse to publish outside of their country yet would sell shitloads if they *ever damn well released them*?
Even the ps1 titles to psp I can’t really complain about – I have one of them little dust collectors and I can tell you, in a single sentence, why games aren’t selling very well on that platform.
“It’s because there is a complete dearth of original and compelling games, it’s either ports of old games we played 6 years or more ago or generic crap that you wouldn’t even buy for your current gen.”
Where is the exploration of the platform? where’s the good use of the wifi?? There is nothing to differentiate between playing on your 360/ps3 and playing on your psp other than better graphics and a more comfortable pad on the static consoles.
Compare this to the DS, where we have a number of titles that make good use of the various abilities of the console (and a lot of trash too, but I digress) and actually makes a distinction between your console in your living room and the one in your bag.
The games on the DS give you a different experience and that helps massively in driving software sales.
This is without even getting into the homebrew scenes on both the DS and PSP… Tho, something I wish Sony and Nintendo would do is mod their firmware to allow them to run homebrew titles out of the box.
I really can’t be bothered to mod my firmware so that I can run the PSP port of Open TTD.
Lets recapture that bedroom coding spirit of the 80/early 90’s!