I Don’t Want to Pirate

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #189. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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Here’s the Thing is where Rob dumps his random thoughts and strong opinions on all manner of nerdy subjects – from videogames and movies to board games and toys.

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Downloading digital game files to run, often through a separate program called an “emulator” (a.k.a. piracy), without paying for the game itself is as common as it is contentious. Depending on who you ask it may be the only good way to play games, just another form of advertising, a sad inevitability of the world we live in, cause direct harm to developers via lost sales or is a plague that needs to be extinguished.

I don’t have any personal objections to the practice for the most part, but here’s the thing: I don’t actively want to pirate videogames. Problem is, publishers aren’t giving people much choice in the matter.

When I say I don’t want to pirate games, I mean I’d rather just buy the game I want and play it until I’ve had my fill. No muss, no fuss. If only it were that easy.

My beloved PlayStation Vita (specifically the proprietary Sony memory stick) crapped out on me a couple of months ago. This may seem like a weird tangent but I have a point, trust me. I wanted to revisit some classic PlayStation, PSP and Vita games that I legitimately bought and kept for years because I knew I’d want to at some point. But almost every game I tried to open would fail to load, and restarting the system caused about 95% of my saved library to vanish.

All those games (again, games I had paid for and still owned) were gone. Unplayable. All thanks to age and Sony’s draconian insistence on using its own branded and overpriced accessories at the time. And because of Sony shutting down the Vita PSN store, I couldn’t reformat or replace the stupid memory stick and re-download everything. I was pissed, but worse than that, I was upset.

This feeds back into the videogame industry’s long running problem with game preservation and general availability. With so many publishers it’s not unreasonable to say “all” as a blanket term actively avoiding back catalog releases (some of which, to be fair, could be due to how nightmarish copyright laws can be), the general public is left with some massive gaps in what they can actually play.

Companies like Nightdive Studios and D4 Enterprise are doing the Lord’s work by remastering/rereleasing a lot of classics, respectively – Nightdive’s recent The Thing: Remastered and System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster along with D4’s Mirai and Mugen No Shinzou come to mind – as well as full-on remakes like System Shock, but it’s nowhere near enough. So, unless you’re only looking for games that were so popular they’re practically a brand identity or are very retro and likely extremely obscure from a US perspective, good luck and happy waiting for the rest of your life!

And, yes, it’s absolutely not just a matter of someone at the office flipping a switch or dragging and dropping game files into a different folder. I get that. But with the emulation scene being what it is these days, it’s still tough to accept the idea that a company “can’t” or “doesn’t want to” do this. Especially if these older titles have rabid fanbases, or their current players would be likely to jump at the chance to see where one of their favorite teams began.

Which brings me back to “sailing the high seas” as it were. When someone’s only option to play an older game they want to play, even if they currently still own the physical disc but lack the hardware to run it, is to download a few files from very specific websites and rights holders be damned, that’s probably what they’re going to do.

For my part, I held off on even trying for years due to a combination of losing a lot of my enthusiasm for niche gaming in general and (mistakenly) believing that modern emulation would be a massive pain in the ass. Turns out that’s not true. Or at least, not entirely true.

If you know where to look, it’s surprisingly easy to get things working on a MacBook and a Switch Pro or PS5 DualSense controller. It’s also pretty damn simple to do the same on an iPhone, and most external controller accessories should simply work without the need to change any settings. Now I can finally play those PSP and PlayStation games that I still own but couldn’t access!

Even so, I still would’ve preferred not taking this approach. Not because I feel guilty (I refuse to believe that Sega would feel even the mildest of stings from me running an .iso of Phantasy Star Portable 2), but because I still consider it easier to just buy the fucking games I want to play for a platform I currently own.

I’ve experienced my brain doing this in real time while perusing available files. Sure, I could grab the PS2 version of The Thing to play on my MacBook, but Nightdive just put out that remaster that both looks better on HD screens and addresses a lot of the original version’s quirks. So, I’ll just skip the download and wait until I’ve got the extra cash to buy the remaster. Simple.

Similarly, a sale on Pac-Man World Re-Pac caught my attention but I have no experience with or nostalgia for the PlayStation original, so this ended up being a sort of makeshift demo for me. And it worked! I enjoyed playing through a couple of levels enough that I hopped onto the eShop the next day and bought Re-Pac before the sale ended.

Yeah, one could argue that there are more classic games being made available thanks to services like PlayStation Plus and Nintendo’s Switch Online plans that include streaming software for NES, SNES, N64 and so on, but I don’t believe that’s enough. Beyond how disappointingly limited the scope of these libraries actually is, they sometimes also rely on an internet connection (looking at you, Nintendo). So not only do you not actually own any of these games, but your ability to play them depends on both maintaining a subscription and a working internet connection.

Paying a subscription fee to access a library may be fine for some folks, but I don’t want to pay $20 to $40 (or more) a month for the option to play a handful of games I miss amidst an ocean of stuff I don’t care about. Plus, not everything in those libraries is guaranteed to stick around forever. If they get pulled for any reason, you’re SoL. No more of that game for you.

Of course, I’m not naive enough to think this will be the case for everyone, but I also know it can’t just be me. We want to play these older games. They don’t even have to be remasters! It’s been great to see so many classics available for purchase on PSN, and to a lesser extent the Switch (because of course they’re not Nintendo’s games)! All of these recent remasters and HD collections have been great! But it’s often just for well-known games, or obscure titles that were never released in the US – and as such, don’t always have an English translation. It’s often not enough.

Publishers need to give people a way to legitimately play these games if they don’t want them to seek alternative means. Because as thrilled as I was to finally suss out the reason a particular Saturn game wasn’t playing audio properly, it took nearly an hour of troubleshooting and combing through Reddit posts. I would honestly have rather paid for an official digital copy on my Switch or PS5 or whatever. Just let me do that. Let me pay you for the games I want to play!

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Rob Rich is a guy who’s loved nerdy stuff since the 80s, from videogames to Anime to Godzilla to Power Rangers toys to Transformers, and has had the good fortune of being able to write about them all. He’s also editor for the Games section of Exploits! You can still find him on Bluesky and Mastodon.