Emulation/Pirate-ness. Your stance on it? [ Poll ]

I pirated System Shock 2 simply because the game requires so much modding to run on modern systems. The file I found works on my machine, and the original ISO (ripped from the disc) did not, so I wasn't about to pay $40 for it, just for it to not work. Typically, I don't agree with rampant game piracy, but I do pirate music, which is ironic.

I'm going to have to say I'm a toss up between C and D.  Typically I have bought games in years past, but I've been moving throughout my life, and things tend to get lost, games being one of them.  I've already paid for the game, am I supposed to pay double for the game just to please the publisher/developer?  And when the game gets old, I'm better off not paying some hoarder on ebay through the nose for something he came across in a garage sale or something.

Not a really good poll as the individual opinions on the subject differ depending on the person.  But whatever, mine's that you can pirate it if you're in a situation that you absolutely can't play the game in another way without wasting a monumental amount of time or money.  If you're very poor, live in a country where there are restrictions in place that you can't get games easily or a place where games are unrealistically expensive, then you can pirate the games that you wouldn't be able to play otherwise.

only pirate things you can't find in stores, or really, really old games is how i go. 

My stance: who cares.

I'd say "yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum", but that sounds too much like "ho-ho-ho", the unholy incantation of Satan Claus. So I'll say that yes, I'm a pirate, but for old games only. My limit is Dreamcast below, inclusive. (Except the GBA, because we all know how dead that is by now.)

If it's a good game and they deserve the money then by all means, buy the game. If it's lazy crappy they put out just to take your money or if it has atrocious DRM then go ahead and pirate it.

Im totally ok with pirating old games (though there is still something to he said for holding the old controller and seeing the system where possible) but im not going to all the trouble to get a cartridge for a SNES game since its not the people making it getting the money and its easier to play SNES games on my DS. The only problem is the definition of old games, for me its up to N64/PS1 though I bought FF7 (and a few other PS1 games) on PSN and have recently bought some Saturn games on Ebay.

And games that arent coming to my country (or at least no reasonable) prospects of it being announced then ill think about it but usually I either dont get it all or if I like it enough pay a lot to import it. 

" If it's a good game and they deserve the money then by all means, buy the game. If it's lazy crappy they put out just to take your money or if it has atrocious DRM then go ahead and pirate it. "

I picked D. Sometimes I wanna play a really old game and cant find it anywhere. Also, I have pirated games before, but I dont anymore. Usually when a friend tells me he pirated a game, I get kind of annoyed since I love PC games and its getting smaller due to piracy. Then a company tries to come up with a solution for piracy like DRM people bitch about. People are probably gonna bitch about me mentioning DRM, but Jeff addressed this on last week's bombcast and I agree with what he said. 

My stance is I emulate games I already own. Playing FF12 on pcsx2 now at 720p and I already played through it once on my ps2. My convenience > anything else.

man i wish we could chose more than one option.  but anyways i chose the 15 year old game one.  even if my idea of 15 years old is last console generation  ; )

If you just want to play the game and it's something like Seiken Densetsu III or Bahamut Lagoon, which are well over a decade old at this point, are no longer supported by the people that made them, the platform they were on is no longer supported by its manufacturer, they were never rereleased on a newer system and there are no plans to rerelease them on a modern system, and it costs two arms and a leg and your soul to get a legit copy from a greedy collector such as myself then yea I think it's ok to download the game. If the game in question doesn't meet all those requirements though then I don't think it's ok. If you have the option of purchasing a game in a manner that will support it's creators then you should buy it.

I've never pirated a game due to having no need to do so, however, I'm in the mindset of D and somewhat E and C.

If it makes you feel better, I imported my copy of Mother 3 before pirating it. I'd buy more copies, but that would be silly.

I love emulators of old stuff.  I don't pirate current stuff.

I pretty much limit myself to Genesis and Game Boy, and that's it oddly enough.

" only pirate things you can't find in stores, or really, really old games is how i go.  "

Not a very good poll, depending on the game some of these choices may not even be valid. There's also lots of overlap. 
 
Anyway, sure, I'll pirate a game here and there, rarely, and I never pirate full priced games mostly because those ones are just too damn inconvenient to pirate.  Do I feel particularly good about it? No. Particularly bad? Well, not enough to stop me from doing it. 

Bad.

If your rationalization is you can't afford it or you don't know if you'll like it, then what you're doing is, instead of finding a way to make some more money, stealing things because, BECAUSE, you might not like it. What happened to not getting something when you're not sure?

Man, some polls need checkboxes instead of radials. C and D, with a cunthair of B.
 
I shoulda used B for Borderlands PC... but my dumb ass bought it without knowing it was a weak port. I'm usually more cautious of PC ports, reading reviews beforehand. But Randy Pitchford claimed it was the definitive version, and for some reason I believed him.

I don't pirate anything that you can still find new.  Anyone who does.... Well you suck.
But I do Emulate pretty much all cartridge system games, Since you will never find them new now anyway so your not ripping off the people who made it.  I also use MAME because There's no arcades that have the old school games anymore, And I'm not willing to dish out $2000+ for one game....   Even though there are a couple arcade games I would pay $1000 for if I could find them (Simpsons...)

I do not play old games unless I randomly find them cheap on steam or already have it on my SNES and decide I want to play it, so I have no reason to really seek out old games and pirate them, but I am not against pirating old games or games that are not sold anymore except through individuals (which does not give profit to the developer or publisher anyways) that sell it way overpriced.  I am completely against pirating games that you can buy in a store or through digital distribution.

I cant even remember the last time I pirated a game. I generally just don't do it at all (even though it isn't illegal in my country and therefore is stealing, no matter how pro-pirate I may seem to some on these forums.

Pick D. i used to BUY pirated game.  but i was a kid then. now that i've a job and  understand that those dude what make the game that i love deserve to get their end of the bargain. i'm playing less games now, but i'm happy about it

I do A, B, C and D.  Mostly C.

I recently had to use a nodisc hack to make a game I bought legally work on Windows 7 (drm software didn't run in vista/7).  For older games I'll get it from abandonware if I can't get it any other way (thank you gog.com) or if I can find a good price on ebay (which sometimes works).

Only if I can't find it in store or online new. Also it needs to be helluh old.

I have a NES , SNES ,  Genesis with Sega CD and 32x add on Consoles and games for all of them.
I downloaded  NES , SNES ,  N64 , Genesis ,  Jaguar  Emulators and the handful of good games for all of them but I don't even play them. 
The game that are a bitch to find and or have not had a Wii VC/ or re-released are fair game .
 
I had to use my brothers pc to rip Crisis, then mount the image on my pc to install it. 
The disc would not spin up properly in my dvd drive , I could only get a small % in to the install it would freeze.

I don't know, to be honest. I would pirate a game if it wasn't illegal, but that sounds so damned idiotic. I wouldn't pirate a game unless I had paid for it already. However, there are protections against this sort of thing now on consoles such as the Xbox 360. So no. I'm not a pirate. If the game won't run on my PC that's not a surprise - it's a laptop, it's hardly made for gaming so why would I be trying to play anything other than Counter-Strike: Source on it.

C, D, and E.  Back in the PS1 and Dreamcast days B would apply as well.  Emulation is strictly limited to old stuff, primarily because I don't have room for dozens of carts to justify the 5 minutes I'd play a game anyway.  I have hundreds of ROMs of old games, but frankly played them less than 10 minutes at most - some not at all, it's just cool to have them in case i want to dig out a quick game of the NES Bionic Commando.  Plus all those ROMs were obtained back in the simpler time of the 90's when shit like Napster and warez was far less frowned upon.
 
I own several legitimate compilations, as well as twenty-plus titles on the Virtual Console, even though I have ROMS of them, and in some cases a physical copy.  It's just easier to play it on the Wii than dig out my Turbo Duo and delicately place my Rondo of Blood disc into the system.

Couldn't you just've had a: I don't pirate-option?
w/e

With older games, let's say pre-last generation, there is no longer any money to be made on them. If I wanna check out pokémon red for a bit, or get my annual link's awakening fix, I cba hoking out my gameboy color, or the cartridges, and hassling about with batteries etc. If I already owned it, I think it's totally cool. I'm aware that's outside the law. However, so is crossing the road when the light isn't green, and I do that.
I'm not a pirate through-and-through (I don't pirate anything current). I'm a pirate who hunts for old trinkets, not valuable treasure.

Indifference. Probably A.

E.  They're not porting it/translating it to my system/country.
 Only way I could get my hands on rare S. Famicom JRPGs with English fan translations. Games like Bahamut Lagoon, Front Mission, Seiken Densetsu 3 etc etc.

I pirate but nothing current or last gen. Mostly snes and n64. I mean it's not like the developers aren't getting anything as I can't buy them new anymore. Virtual console was good but the games I want are not released on there. so my only other opition is eBay or some other place.

D. most likely its used by that time and the money is not going to the company who made it so what would be wrong with pirating it

I don't see any option for "I do not do it. Ever.". Very strange. 
 
I don't pirate because as tightly budgeted as I am, I believe the creators of a product should get some compensation for their work. Yes, even if it's a large soulless corporation. For me this extends to emulation, though in some cases it's a gray area, I just tend to avoid the issue. 
 
As far as securom activations and bypassing DRM goes, if the included DRM is completely unacceptable to me I have no problem with not playing the game at all until said DRM is patched out or I can pick it up so cheaply that I don't mind it essentially being a collection item with a burning fuse on it.

D is totally justified as when you pay that money, the company who made it gets none of it. Honestly, used games are just as bad as piracy if you understand who deserves money for a game.  
 
E is true for Mother 3, as seeing as they decided not to invest any money in translating Mother 3, they do not deserve any of the returns they might've gotten. Also, as someone whose N64 broke 6 years ago, I say C. For what its worth, if a game popped up in a DS remake, on live arcade, or Virtual Console I tended to rebuy it.

Personally, I'll only pirate a PC game initially if they don't release a demo, mainly because of the fact that PC game developers have varying degrees of skill when it comes to optimizing performance.  My PC is pretty old now, so I don't want to buy a game, only to find out that it runs poorly on my PC.  If it runs well, and I actually enjoy the game, then I'll buy it.

The only time I've pirated a game has been when I've already owned it.  And that's been...3 times.
 
All three were games that were 7-10 years old.
 
Don't pirate video games.

Not A. B and C sound more like excuses. I live in North America so I can't pick E. So D.

I endorse several of those views, but I went with B.

I usually buy games because Steam is such a convenient service that I like to support it, and also because many multiplayer games are difficult to crack, and you have to download a new crack every time a new patch comes out. I will sometimes torrent old games that aren't in production anymore (like Final Fantasy VII or the like), games I have owned in the past but can't seem to find, and game's that didn't get very good reviews that I want to try out. Truthfully though, I don't view torrenting games, especially singleplayer games, as stealing, rather as sharing. If nobody seeds torrents, nobody can leach them. It's the same as a buddy lending you a disc for a game they've gotten tired of.

I do not typically view older games as holding any real value. Just because Nintendo releases on the virtual console doesn't mean I'm going to play that version instead of emulating it on my PC.
 
Newer games, however, I do not pirate as much. Mostly because I buy most newer games on consoles, but with PC games, I may pirate it and end up buying once I'm convinced it's worth it (which is pretty much how I came to own most of the games on my steam games list.)