Piracy Reigns

Over the past 2 weeks, Son No 1 and I have visited several shopping malls, looking for a new Wii game.

Son No 1 was having his Easter break and was looking forward to a new Wii game. We did not have plans to go anywhere for the holidays because the two younger boys were still having school. The 3 boys follow different school calendars and that make it difficult for us to plan vacations. In fact, their holidays do not coincide until December.

Anyway, while traipsing from one shop to another, I was reminded once again how rampant piracy was in this part of the world. Most of the game-shops stock only pirated Wii games. I guess that is where the demand lies. The handful of shops that carry the original games had only token titles.

We do not stand on moral high ground on this issue and frankly, would have bought the pirated games... if only we could play them on our console. But we made the mistake (?) of purchasing a Wii console that was not "cracked". Only the "cracked" type of console could play the pirated versions of the game.

We already knew the difference when we chose to buy the original Wii console. We knew that the original Wii console could play only original Wii games, which cost substantially more, but this factor did not figure prominently in our purchasing decision as it was never our intention to buy a lot of Wii games - it would be too distracting for the children.

Furthermore, we thought we should be assured of a continual stream of games from the original creators while there was no such assurance from the pirates. If the pirates faced a massive crackdown, there would be no more pirated games and the "cracked" console would be rendered useless. As the original and the "cracked" consoles cost about the same, it seemed to make sense at that time to buy the original console.

But we have underestimated the pirates. They truly have cornered the entire market here. So, although we were willing to pay 20 to 30 times more for the original games, we could not lay our hands on the titles that we wanted. The shops were just not selling them. The pirates have won convincingly.

The last few original games that we bought were from Singapore and we were about to send an SOS to our relatives there to courier to us the original games. But in the end, Son No 1 chose a title, that was not his first choice - but was a first-shooter game nevertheless - and settled for that. I guess it was partly due to what is known in the marketing world as buyers' fatigue. He was just too tired to go round shopping any more and just wanted to get over with it.

And so what is the dubious moral of the story? If we can't beat them, join them??? *Sigh*